ON A WINTER DAY forty years ago, I remember standing in a country village far from Moscow looking for a church — as was my wont. I approached a bent, much bundled, aged woman. I asked her if there was a church close by and, if so, where I might go to find it. Her eyes were the pale, watery blue sometimes characteristic of the old. A deeply melancholy expression came over her face, and she answered: "It's a long, long walk to church."

In point of fact, for the quarter century between Khrushchev's campaign against religion and Gorbachev's revision of policy in 1988, one could travel east from Chita for 1,000 kilometers on the Trans-Siberian Railroad without passing a single church. One could also travel 600 kilometers west from there without passing a church. Sakha-Yakutia, with an area more than the size of the United States east of the Mississippi, has had only one church from the time of the Khrushchev drive until 1993. Most of the million Russians living east of the Urals and north of the sixty-second parallel have had to travel almost 2,000 kilometers to reach the nearest functioning church. Truly, it has been a long walk to church.

This study is a secular examination of the history of the Russian Orthodox Church in recent times. It is difficult to be objective about religion. I am reminded of a cartoon published long ago of a matron in a bookshop asking for "an impartial history of the [U.S.] Civil War, written from the Southern point of view." For those who might be curious, I am a member of the United Church of Christ.

For those unfamiliar with Orthodox ecclesiastical usage, a monastic priest takes a saint's name when he becomes a monk and drops his surname. Sometimes, in written works, the surname is added in parentheses after the saint's name in order to avoid confusion. For example, one might write "Metropolitan Kirill (Gundyaev)." The metropolitan's name as a boy was Vladimir Mikhailovich Gundyaev.

I am indebted to Zbigniew K. Brzezinski, to the late Philip E. Mosely, and to the late Frank Nowak, who reviewed early work that ultimately led to this manuscript. Haym Jaffe of Drexel University assisted me in statistical projections. William C. Fletcher of the University of Kansas read this manuscript and prepared a perceptive, enlightening, and immensely helpful commentary on the book and all its parts. Donald W. Treadgold of the University of Washington encouraged me to go to Westview Press and introduced me to senior editor Peter W. Kracht, who has proved extremely helpful and unfailingly supportive of my efforts — as has his associate, Mick Gusinde-Duffy. The project editor, Mary Jo Lawrence, and the copy editor, Ida May B. Norton, have been extremely helpful and untiring in their care, patience, and support. I am also indebted to my wife, Elizabeth, my son, Thomas Rohde Davis, and my daughter, Margaret Davis Mainardi, for criticism, editing, and work on the draft. The manuscript was typed by my son, and some early materials were typed by my daughter. James F. Winstead of Harvey Mudd College prepared the graphs in the volume.

Research for this study was supported in part by a grant from the International Research and Exchange Board (IREX), with funds provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the United States Information Agency. Research was also supported by a fellowship from the John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation. None of these organizations is responsible for the views expressed.

N. D.

WHEN THE COMMUNISTS took control in Russia, they were determined to subdue all opposition forces, including the Russian Orthodox Church. More fundamentally, as Marxists, they wanted to build a society without God, and the church blocked the way. Not only in the lands that became the Soviet Union but in every country where the communists seized power after World War II, a struggle between the state and the churches ensued.

Twice in the history of communist rule in the Soviet Union, the Bolsheviks and the Soviet state drove the church to the threshold of institutional death, or at least to its antechamber. The first time was at the end of the 1930s, when Stalin's men had wiped out virtually all of the resources of the church. The second time, although less dramatic, was in Brezhnev's "period of stagnation." Following Khrushchev's headlong assault in the early 1960s, the subsequent slow erosion of Orthodox institutional strength exposed the possibility of the church's ultimate extinction.

Both times, fortuitous events saved the institutional body of the church. In 1939, the turnaround followed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Soviet annexations, Hitler's invasion of the USSR, German permissiveness toward Orthodox Church renewal in the occupied zones, and Stalin's later policies toward liberated areas. In the late 1980s, the millennium of the baptism of Rus in 988 (the Millennium), glasnost and democratization, Gorbachev's felt need for new sources of support, his desire for international acceptance, and his pragmatism led to a new Soviet religious policy. Now, after the collapse of the communist institution, aggressive Marxist ideological materialism in Russia is a whispered memory. For a second time the church is rising like a phoenix from the ashes of misfortune.

Why has the church twice been renewed in vigor and strength? Was it luck, which could change? Was it something intrinsic in the natural order that prevents the triumph of antireligion? Was it the constancy of God, which ultimately rules human history, politics, and society? ¹ There are at least two problems in any attempt to answer these questions. First one must consider whether the things observed in the external realm of life — church buildings, priests, church attendance, and other religious activities — truly reflect the inner reality. Second, one must consider whether the world's historical and social experience makes it possible to say that the communists, in trying to build an atheist society, assumed an inherently impossible task.

Religion has been defined as "the outward act or form by which men indicate their recognition of the existence of a god. . . the outer form and embodiment [of] the inner spirit." ² Outward manifestations are all that can really be examined, as a secular analysis of the inner spirit is uncongenial to the instincts of social scientists and historians. It was also beyond the communists' natural reach.

Nevertheless, churches are earthly institutions, rooted in the terrain of observable reality. They are not made of disembodied ectoplasm, conjured up out of nothingness. In June 1991, Patriarch Aleksi II (Ridiger) responded to those who claimed that the head of the Russian Orthodox Church in the late 1920S, Metropolitan Sergi (Stragorodski), could have defied the communists and refused to make a declaration of loyalty to a godless state: Metropolitan Sergi wanted to save the Church. I know that many people, hearing these words, protest that it is Christ who saves the Church and not people. This is true. But it is also true that, without human efforts, God's help does not save. The Ecumenical Church is indestructible. But where is the celebrated Church of Carthage? Are there Orthodox believers today in Kaledoniya, in Asia Minor, where Gregory the Illuminator and Basil the Great earned their renown? Before our eyes the Church in Albania was destroyed. . . . And in Russia there were powers wishing to do the same thing. ³

Think of a "City of God" in the Soviet Union, which the communists assaulted in their days of militant atheism. The city's "temples" might represent the various religious bodies, each one rooted in the earth, where the city could be attacked and where its dimensions on the ground could be measured. Each of the temples also had — and has — a vertical dimension in the realm of the spirit, and no one who stood on the earth could clearly see to the tops of the columns, domes, and towers, as they were shrouded in mist. That is the realm of philosophers and theologians, who are not earthbound. This study will describe the situation on the ground; it is at this level that the communists made their assault, because they too were earthbound. ⁴

When they were young and filled with optimism and arrogance, the communists honestly believed that they could destroy the temples by knocking out the bottoms of the columns and by blocking all efforts to shore them up. Faith might have died within a generation or two in a nation where no house of worship stood, where no priest celebrated the liturgy, where no one taught a child about God, and where an empty silence of the spirit ruled the land. Even a catacomb church was within reach of the communists' bulldozers. Dedicated Christians worshiping secretly in the deep forest might have been hard to find and apprehend, but their activity was still of flesh and blood and not beyond the grasp of state authority if the believers were pursued with sufficient means and determination.

The image of an earthbound "temple" is intended only to distinguish the inquiries of the historian and the philosopher, not to describe the churches as inert or the historian's task as a simple measurement of dimensions and unchanging forms. At its heart a church consists of people; it might better be described as "an army on the march." ⁵ Moreover, religious institutions do not always grow or shrink incrementally, which would enable the scholar to count churches, priests, and other resources and project trends in some linear fashion. Hegel wrote that "history is in fact a spiral process; great creative periods are followed by periods of reaction in which the spirit, apparently dying, is restoring itself to emerge in new creativity at a higher level." ⁶ The Chinese philosopher Lin Yutang said much the same thing: "Thoughts and ideas are somewhat like seeds. They have a way of lying dormant underground until a more favorable climate brings them again to life." ⁷

The appearance on the world stage of great individuals also results in imponderables and discontinuities. Perhaps this is the curse of historians, particularly those who write their histories too soon. Augustus, who left a memoir of the most notable events of his reign, made no mention of the birth of Christ. The year before the Millennium of the baptism of Rus, 1987, may have been like 1533 — the year before Luther completed his translation of the Bible, Calvin began to write the Institutes, and the Society of Jesus was conceived. By the time 1991 had drawn to a close, the collapse of communist government and of the USSR had provided a discontinuity no less portentous than the events that followed the year 1533. History's great periods of tumult are inherently uncontrollable, unpredictable, ruled by personality and chance, and also by those furious, primordial forces that characterize social revolutions in every epoch. Some anthropologists and historians have argued that the communists' objective of eradicating religious practice was intrinsically unattainable. They point out that secular power has never succeeded in eradicating religious practice in any society and that this suggests some fundamental human need to worship. Were the communists necessarily doomed to failure?

As a step toward providing the answer, we may all agree that secular political power has been able to change religious patterns, even if not to eliminate them. In 1555 the Treaty of Augsburg, between the Catholics and Protestants in Germany, decreed that the religion of a territory would be determined by its prince. With few exceptions, it was. Similarly, in Kievan Rus, Prince Vladimir accepted Orthodox Christianity in 988, thereby determining the prevailing religion in his land. It is also clear from history that redirecting religious allegiances has always been a bloody and a difficult business. A realistic communist would have concluded that the destruction of a competing religion required a great and sustained effort. Nevertheless, religions — indigestible though they may be — have been devoured by the adherents of other faiths.

Religions can undeniably be changed, but can religion be destroyed? To prove that communist power could not have eradicated religion, one must show both that (1) religion is an intrinsic and universal social need, and (2) communism is not a substitute faith.

The renowned anthropologist Ruth Benedict wrote in the 1930s that religious phenomena are universal, and her findings are still accepted by her colleagues:

A note of caution must be added here. Although it is broadly true that religion can be found in every society, not all individuals feel the need to worship. Therefore, it would seem that religion is not essential in individual terms, even though it appears to be so in social and societal terms.

Alternatively, an inquiry into past realities might indicate whether religion is an intrinsic social need. A record of constancy in the intensity of religious observance throughout history — regardless of state policy or other secular influences — would strengthen the argument that religion is an elemental force that cannot be suppressed. There have been vast changes over time, however, in the level of apparent religious loyalty. In the history of the West, the age that followed Christ's life and teaching has been characterized as intensely religious, as has the thirteenth century — the age of the cathedral builders. For an age of reduced religious intensity in Western civilization, one might choose Greece at the time of Alexander's conquests, when even the mystery religions appeared to have become stagnant. Before Mohammed, the religious ideas of the pagan Arabs were said to have been vague and scanty. Then came the Prophet, followed by the triumphant march of Islam.

If we think of the religious impulse as something that can be stimulated, we must also concede that it can be reduced or can atrophy. In fact, some historical support might be found for the communists' contention that social progress brings secularization.

As a matter of historical record, atheism has seldom been espoused, and the lack of historical adherence to atheism means that there are few examples from which to argue that the communists' atheistic experiment had to fail. The precedent that most readily comes to mind is the campaign against religion during the French Revolution, but this attack was not sufficiently coherent or prolonged to demonstrate the intrinsic strengths or weaknesses of a godless social order. The very fact that the communists' road has been so nearly unexplored makes it difficult to assert with confidence that natural forces would block it.

Moreover, totalitarianism is a modern concept, and communism probably went further than its competitors in imposing control over people's lives and minds. The communists developed techniques of mass psychological manipulation that might have enabled them to accomplish more ambitious social mutations than authoritarian states had been able to achieve previously.

For a communist theoretician, the universality of religion did not present a serious problem — religion was consistently regarded by the Marxists as a symptom of exploitation, suffering, fear, and ignorance. Exploitation was considered universal prior to the establishment of socialism in Russia; thus it was not surprising that religion was also universal. Because the world the communists sought to create was avowedly unique, a society without religion likewise would have been unique. Nevertheless, when all is said and done, the apparent universality of religious observance remains an arresting historical and social fact.

Was communism a substitute faith? If it was, one can make the argument that religion is a universal societal phenomenon by pointing out that the communists were simply trying to replace the traditional religions in the Soviet Union with their own creed. Here we must not confuse Christianity and the other highly developed doctrines with religious manifestations that appear to be universal. According to Ruth Benedict, religion is not the "pursuit of ideal ends" or "the desire to live more virtuously and to interpret the transitory in terms of the eternal." She explained that primitive cosmologies are often elaborated in direct contradiction of the theme of good and evil and observed that "religion is not historically a citizenship in an ideal world, but had to do with success in this world." ⁹

Communism actually had most of these elements, including the "pursuit of ideal ends," citizenship in an ideal world, and success in this one. One of the most important attributes scholars ascribe to the world religions is an integrated belief system that gives meaning and regularity to the human experience and unites doctrine with action. In the glory days of the Bolshevik movement, the communists' godless creed accomplished this. Reinhold Niebuhr argued that the real faith of modern society is faith in history, which has the promise and meaning of existence and takes the place of God. In this sense, Marx founded a "historical" religion.

Paul Tillich observed that both Old Testament prophetic revelation and Marxism "regard the fight between good and evil forces as the main content of history." ¹⁰ John C. Bennett commented: If religion is defined as man's relationship to whatever he regards as ultimate or to whatever he trusts most for deliverance from the evils and hazards of life, then Communism is undoubtedly religious. . . . Communism occupies the place in life for the convinced Communist that religions occupy in the lives of their adherents. Communism offers a goal for life. It offers a faith in redemption from all recognized evils. ¹¹

Communism shared with many religions and several secular callings the physical accompaniments of worship, including ceremonies, shrines, and rites. Lenin's mausoleum and the Red Square parades, complete with icons of Lenin and other communist saints, were examples. It takes an act of faith to be an atheist for the same reasons it takes an act of faith to be a believer.

Of course, there are some characteristics associated with religion that communism never shared. One of these is the immortality of the soul, which some — but not all — religions espouse. Communism's denial of the afterlife may not have been troublesome to a young person building Soviet socialism in the mid-1920S. However, in times of war, bereavement, or approaching death, the individual who was otherwise satisfied with communism might have been inclined to seek the comfort of religion. The communists acknowledged that this was the case during World War II. They explained such backsliding by saying that insufficient time had elapsed after the 1917 revolution to erase the earlier religious culture.

Perhaps the key element in religion that communism lacked is the recognition of the supernatural. Ruth Benedict defined the supernatural in primitive religions as a "wonderful power," or a "voltage, with which the universe is said to be charged." ¹² In other religions it is God. This assertion of the supernatural is universal in religion and constitutes for many scholars its definitive quality. In actuality, however, the emphasis on the supernatural has varied widely from one religion to another. Moreover, if the only element lacking in communism that can be surely identified in all the world's religions is supernaturalism, this would mean that the essential difference between communism and religious faith is an element shared by religion, magic and superstition. This was the view of the communists, who asserted that tribal peoples feared the natural forces that destroyed crops or threatened the community's welfare. Failing to understand these natural forces, tribal peoples made gods of them. The cure was knowledge.

Albert Boiter commented: Others see Soviet communism as a new religion in everything but name, lacking only belief in a transcendental being. But even this void is seen by some as being filled by the deification of science and progress. Franz Cardinal Koenig (1975) of Vienna has accused the Soviet government of maintaining a confessional state of the traditional type, with the state acting as protector of one established faith. ¹³

Although it is true that the supernatural element in primitive religion is not exalting, each society lives according to its own sophistication of thought and complexity of experience. Both the primitive and the advanced society, each in its own terms, may find some fulfillment in acknowledging a higher or different power beyond human grasp or understanding. The communists, who believe there is no heaven, saw no need to build toward it in the vertical dimension of the spirit. To those who believe that altars should point toward the sky, the communists appear to have constructed their temples by marbling over the barren ground, which stretches out in one vast, glittering, empty temple floor. Earlier in this discussion I argued that secular influences have a genuine impact on a church's inner condition or, to phrase it another way, that a church's foundations are embedded in the real world. I also asked whether the communists tried to create a religious void or merely to clear a place for their own faith. Even if one could find a religious essence in terms which disqualify the communist "creed," this would still leave a number of alternative possibilities. I posed several of them thirty-five years ago when I was completing a dissertation on the church under communism. I suggested that the pressure of natural forces to fill the religious vacuum in the communists' realm might have crumpled the materialists' social order; alternatively, it might have pushed the communists back from any effort to destroy the churches. For their part, the churches conceivably might have been pushed into the narrow corner of human experience occupied by superstition and magic. Another possibility was that the sharpness of the communists' determination to annihilate religion might have dulled and that fraternization and compromise might have grown from a tactic to a condition. ¹⁴

What is interesting today is how close to having been answered and resolved these questions and alternatives seem to be. Fraternization and compromise did grow from a tactic to a condition in the Soviet Union, but the onrush of events did not stop there. The communist faith disintegrated. Totalitarian communist power, after a spasm in August 1991, crumbled. The communist motherland fragmented. Relatively few people, at least in the developed "first world," still think of communism as a compelling substitute faith. Arthur Koestler was correct when he called communism "the God that failed." Corruption, careerism, and cronyism in Brezhnev's "era of stagnation" washed away the materialists' commitment. Successor governments in the former Soviet Union abandoned the effort to destroy the churches. Most of them are, almost poignantly, now seeking the support of Russian Orthodoxy, Islam, and other religious communities. The dogmatists of atheism are stumbling in the wilderness.

Whether the present situation will be permanent is another question. Not much in the former Soviet Union today can be regarded as stable, lasting, or reliable. An attempt to resolve this question here, however, would be to jump to the end of this story, and we are just beginning. This introduction should not end without a glimpse of the passion, beauty, and faith that characterize the Russian Orthodox Church world. Anyone who has been present during Orthodox services over the years has a head filled with pictures. They are of bundled old women in scarves and felt boots creaking to their knees and bowing down over the cold stones of the sanctuary floor. They are of the deeply lined countenances of aged priests, a distant light shining from tired eyes. They are of the faces of the women carrying collection plates through crowds of worshipers, cheeks illuminated by sturdy candles planted among the ruble notes. They are of the exhilaration, crush, and, yes, odor of immense crowds as midnight turns to Easter morn. They are of the catch in one's breath when the news is passed that Christ is risen. They are of the woman behind the candle counter who presses a single egg painted blood red into one's hand at Eastertime. ¹⁵

The pictures are of alert, intelligent young men and women presenting themselves for baptism, diffidently, uncomfortably, but resolutely. They are of the dark shadows of faithful, ancient nuns. They are of thousands of flickering candles, white beards, glittering miters, and golden robes and of the resonance of choral singing by unaccompanied voices. They are of the eyes of Jesus and the Mother of God looking out from icons into one's own eyes, no matter where one stands. They are of the smell of incense. They are of little, wooden country churches with shingled onion domes approached by walking across wet fields. They are of a dark-suited, bearded man walking down a street, looking to neither the right nor the left, who turns into a churchyard and unlocks the door of an empty church before scheduled services.

The pictures are of the robust woman in the bell tower of the St. Florus nunnery in Kiev pulling on dozens of big and little ropes in an almost frenzied but joyous dance as her bells peal out to the world in a triumphal cacophony. They are of the priest in the village of Ib telling U.S. visitors matter-of-factly that there were 120 priests in Komi until the late 1930s when 100 of them were taken to the airport and were shot dead as "enemies of the people." They are of the old widower made bishop of Brest in 1990, shown with his arms around a sturdy peasant who has knelt and buried his head in the folds of the bishop's cassock. They are of the round old woman in the Kharkov cathedral, just before services, telling a U.S. student to take his hands out of his pockets and stand erect, after her rotund form had perfectly imitated his long and languid slouch. They are of the old mother in the Kiev railroad station in Moscow blessing her grown and visibly embarrassed son before he takes his train. They are of the published snapshot of another old bishop and a young priest taken from across a meadow as they sit on a bench near a church, two distant black figures, talking of eternal things. ¹⁶

The pictures reflect the affirmation of Orthodox writers that the church is a living body where today's believers are surrounded by all the saints who have ever lived. As one Russian Orthodox priest put it, "Today living saints walk the face of the earth in Russia."

The year 1939 was the worst in history for the Russian Orthodox Church. Never before had the institutional and human situation of the church been quite so desperate. Never again, after the Soviet territorial acquisitions of 1939-1940 brought new priests, bishops, and resources to the church, would it become quite so bad.

In 1939 the acting head of the church, Metropolitan Sergi (Stragorodski), lived in Moscow, virtually cut off from the few score churches still functioning in the vast Soviet land. According to a well-informed observer, Wassilij Alexeev, "Sergi awaited arrest each minute. . . . His attendant went away during the night, fearing that he would be arrested with the Metropolitan [if he stayed]. . . . The aging hierarch remained completely alone . . . and if something like a heart attack had occurred, he would have died without aid of any kind." ¹

All the monasteries, nunneries, and seminaries were closed. Dioceses did not exist as administrative units. A few of the separated churches sent irregular letters to the metropolitan, but even this meager correspondence consisted mostly of greetings. ² The Russian Orthodox Church was in agony.

How did the church reach this pass? Although this book focuses on post-World War II events and more particularly on the contemporary situation, a brief review of the church-state struggle between 1917 and 1939 may be in order.

When the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917, the Russian Orthodox Church was electing its first patriarch since the time of Peter the Great (1682-1725). After the fall of the czar, even the modernists in the church had become convinced that a strong, unifying leader was needed, and the provisional government had given permission for a church council with the authority to act. Eleven days after the storming of the Winter Palace, Metropolitan Tikhon (Belavin) of Moscow was chosen by lot from among three elected candidates. ³

The new Soviet government already had nationalized all church lands, and it would soon decree the separation of church and state, cancel the church's status as a juridical entity, ban state subsidies to clergy and religious bodies, seize church bank accounts, deny legal standing to church marriages, divorces, and baptisms, and ban organized religious education of the young.

Still, most of the church leaders believed that the communist government was an affliction that would pass. After electing Patriarch Tikhon, the council affirmed that the Russian Orthodox Church was the national church of Russia, that the state needed church approval to legislate on matters relating to the church, that blasphemy should remain illegal, that church schools should be recognized, and that the head of the Russian state and the top appointees in education and religious affairs should be Orthodox. ⁴

In January of 1918, the patriarch excommunicated the faith's "open and secret enemies." ⁵ Other pronouncements from the patriarch and the church council followed, excommunicating priests or laymen who connived against duly appointed ecclesiastics, facilitated antichurch legislation, laid hands on Orthodox churchmen, or committed acts against the church. ⁶ The stage was set for confrontation, and it came, despite the patriarch's refusal to support the Bolsheviks' enemies in the civil war that soon engulfed the nation. In fact, the church-state struggle was but a part of the cataclysm through which Russia was passing. All of society had been riven asunder, and the misfortunes of the church seemed to be, in a sense, by-products of revolution and chaos.

On the all-European scene, Russia was losing World War I, having suffered over 9 million casualties — more than any other belligerent. Appalling conditions had characterized the situation at the front. Sometimes Russian soldiers had been obliged to wait in backup trenches, lacking even rifles, until the deaths of comrades allowed them to scavenge arms. As the British military attaché described it, the soldiers had been "churned into gruel" by German artillery. ⁷ In the peace treaty with Germany signed in March 1918, the Soviet Union lost a third of its population and a third of its arable lands.

The defeat abroad hardly matched the upheavals at home. Soldiers streamed home to their villages to grab pieces of land. Russia's erstwhile allies invaded Britain and the United States in the far north, Britain and France in the south, and Japan and the United States in the far east. Anti-Bolshevik forces advanced toward Petrograd and Moscow from the north, south, east, and west. In the meantime, former Czech and Slovak prisoners of war seized the Trans-Siberian Railroad. Cruelty, brutality, and torture were appalling. Just as the anti-Bolsheviks faltered and the Western powers began losing stomach for their interventions, the Poles attacked. Kiev changed hands seventeen times between 1918 and 1921 before a peace favorable to Poland was signed in Riga.

In the countryside, the Bolsheviks organized Committees of the Village Poor and sent out workers and soldiers from the cities to seize grain. Peasant revolts swept the countryside, and the civil war became a peasant war. Industrial output plummeted to one-seventh of its prewar level. Citizens fled Moscow and Petrograd seeking food and safety in the countryside; more than half the people in those cities abandoned them. The ruble stood at one two-hundred-thousandth of its prewar value.

Over 7 million people died from hunger and epidemics; cannibalism spread. The editor of Pomoshch [Relief], the organ of the All-Russia Famine Relief Committee described it: "People mainly ate members of their own families as they died, feeding on the older children, but not sparing newborn infants either . . . despite the fact that there wasn't much to them." ⁸

In this context of desperation, the Bolshevik regime demanded the church's valuables for famine relief. On February 19, 1922, the patriarch duly asked parishes to surrender all precious articles except those used in sacraments and worship. A few days later the government launched a propaganda campaign against a "heartless" church and ordered virtually every treasure confiscated, including consecrated vessels. ⁹ Loyal Orthodox believers rallied to defend their sacramental treasures, and the Russian press reported some 1,400 bloody fights as priests and parishioners tried to guard their churches. ¹⁰ The bloodiest incidents occurred in Shuya, east of Moscow, where church supporters and Bolsheviks battled for days. Throughout the country churches were closed by force, and priests and hierarchs were arrested. Although there had been bloody incidents before, this was the first great crisis in the church-state struggle. ¹¹

Almost a half century later it was revealed that Lenin had sent a secret memorandum to his Politburo colleagues on March 19, 1922, in which he wrote with brutal candor that the campaign to seize church treasures was intended to break the power of the clergy, not simply to obtain resources with which to buy food. Lenin called the opportunity "exceptionally beneficial," the only moment "when we are given ninety-nine out of 100 chances to gain a full and crushing victory" over the clerical enemy and assure ourselves the necessary positions for decades ahead. It is precisely now and only now, when there is cannibalism . . . and corpses are lying along the roads that we can (and therefore must) carry out the confiscation of valuables with fanatical and merciless energy. . . . No other opportunity but the current terrible famine will give us a mood of the wide masses such as would provide us with their sympathies or at least neutrality. . . . Now our victory over the reactionary clergy is guaranteed. . . . The trial of the Shuya rioters for resisting aid to the hungry [should] be conducted in as short a time as possible, concluding in the maximum possible number of executions. . . . If possible, similar executions should be carried out in Moscow and other spiritual centers of the country. ¹²

The fight over church treasures had ongoing consequences. On May 6, 1922,

Patriarch Tikhon was placed under house arrest — accused of resisting the confiscations. Leaders of reformist and leftist currents that had developed within the church, particularly after the 1905 Edict of Toleration, took advantage of Tikhon's confinement to seize control of the patriarchal chancery and church administration. ¹³ Calling themselves Renovationists, these clerics had coalesced into three factions. The largest of them, the Living Church, was led by Archpriest Vladimir Krasnitski, a radical-rightist cleric before World War I, who emerged as a leader of the married priests who wanted to change the Orthodox rule that permitted only monastic clergy to aspire to episcopal office. The second Renovationist grouping was led by Father Aleksandr Ivanovich Vvedenski, a charismatic preacher who was alleged to be a libertine and police collaborator. Clerics in Vvedenski's Union of Communities of Ancient Apostolic Churches also wanted to open the door to married priests becoming bishops. The smallest but most respected grouping was led by Bishop, then Metropolitan, Antonin (Granovski), an opponent of autocracy even in the prerevolutionary time. The Renovationists had Bolshevik support, clearly motivated by the authorities' desire to split and thereby rule the church. The government turned over the majority of the functioning Orthodox churches in the country to the collaborating Renovationists. ¹⁴

For moral, traditional, and political reasons, most of the Orthodox laity disdained the Renovationists. The church schism was a blow to the institutional integrity of the patriarchal church, however, and it influenced Tikhon in his decision to "confess" anti-Soviet acts, renounce them, and declare that he was "no longer an enemy of the Soviet Government." The authorities freed him on June 26, 1923, and he was able to reassert his authority and turn the tide against the Renovationists. ¹⁵

By late 1924 the Renovationists had lost their control over a third to a half of the churches the authorities had given them. In the meantime, Lenin had died and Stalin was slowly consolidating his power. The New Economic Policy was bringing economic recovery and a modicum of normality. During this time, the strength of the patriarchal church grew. ¹⁶

On April 7, 1925, Patriarch Tikhon died, and his death plunged the church into a rolling crisis of leadership. By 1927, ten out of eleven prelates successively named to act as head of the church were in prison or exile, and most of the bishops were in similar straits. ¹⁷ The man who emerged as acting head of the church was Metropolitan Sergi (Stragorodski) of Nizhni-Novgorod. Arrested more than once, Sergi was released from prison in March of 1927 and issued a loyalty declaration to the Soviet government on July 24 of that year. Its key passage, which outraged many Orthodox in the Soviet Union and in the Russian emigration, recognized "the Soviet Union as our civil motherland, whose [the motherland's] joys and successes are our joys and successes, and whose misfortunes are our misfortunes." ¹⁸

Under the leadership of Metropolitan Antoni (Khrapovitski), formerly of Kiev, émigré Russian churchmen had met in the Serbian town of Sremski Karlovci in 1921 and established the Karlovci Synod, which ultimately became the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad. Promonarchist and prointerventionist resolutions of the synod had complicated Tikhon's position at the time of the first great antichurch campaign in 1922. Although Sergi did not collaborate with the Karlovcians, he had confidential correspondence with them, and the synod published a letter from Sergi in 1926 that the Bolsheviks used as a pretext for Sergi's arrest. After Sergi's loyalty declaration of 1927, the Karlovcians fiercely opposed Sergi and his perceived capitulation and came to regard the underground True Orthodox Church and True Orthodox Christians as the legitimate voices of Orthodoxy in the USSR. Metropolitan Iosif (Petrovykh), Metropolitan Agafangel (Preobrazhenski), Metropolitan Kirill (Smirnov), Bishop Aleksi (Bui), and the majority of the bishops imprisoned in the camps on the Solovetski Islands distanced themselves from Sergi and his loyalty declaration, although not all of them repudiated his authority. ¹⁹

The quieter times of the New Economic Policy were shattered by the forced industrialization and collectivization drives that started in 1928. At the end of 1929 and at the beginning of 1930, as had been the case in 1921 and 1922, troops and party workers fanned out into the countryside, this time to force the peasants to join collective farms. Peasant resistance produced violence once again, and farmers slaughtered their livestock and ate or destroyed stores of food and seed. Hunger returned. Although Stalin temporarily reined in the collectivization drive in March of 1930, pressures on the peasants soon resumed and a man-made famine spread. It reached appalling proportions in Ukraine and the northern Caucasus in 1932. At least 5 million people died from hunger and attendant diseases. A Soviet demographer noted a population loss of 7.5 million. In his memoirs, Nikita Khrushchev described how trains pulled into Kiev loaded with corpses of people who had starved to death; railroad workers had picked them up all along the route from Poltava. The rivers of the northern Caucasus carried thousands of bodies to the sea. ²⁰

As in the famine of 1922, the church was among the victims. Farmers posted guards and defended their churches and priests with scythes and pitchforks, but many priests and peasants were swept away in the general violence. The campaign changed the face of the countryside, which has been dotted ever since with the shells of churches serving as granaries, overcrowded dwellings, storehouses, and workshops, their rusting and disintegrating cupolas standing hollow against the sky. In 1932 city churches also became targets, and the 1929-1933 period became the second great wave of church closings. ²¹

In a dissertation completed some years ago, I made an effort to analyze the communist authorities' strategies and the churches' counterstrategies in their struggle in both the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe. ²² I shall not repeat the argument here. It was notable, however, that the evolution of communist strategy in the USSR came rather close to repeating itself in the "people's democracies" of Eastern Europe three decades after the battles between the Bolsheviks and Russian Orthodox believers. In both areas there was an initial political struggle characterized by violence, arrests, and church closings. The pattern continued with communist efforts to divide the various religious communities and split the ranks of clerical adversaries — the Orthodox in Russia, Bulgaria, Romania, and Serbia; the Roman Catholics in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Croatia; and the Lutherans in East Germany. Church leaders in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe were subsequently forced to make declarations of political submission, with varying degrees of exception in Poland, East Germany, and one or two other places.

Both in the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe, the frontal assault on religious communities receded over time and became a long process of attrition. This was partly because in most cases church leaders ceased to rally political opposition to communist rule and also because the costs to the communist authorities in foreign policy, internal popular discontent, and ideological embarrassment outweighed any need to liquidate the "religious problem" through precipitate means. The ideological embarrassment was related to the fact that Marx and Engels had taught that religion was a symptom of oppression, an "opium" to dull the workers' outrage and convert their revolutionary zeal into passivity, manifested in the dream of happiness in the next world rather than in this one. Theoretically, religion should have withered away naturally in a socialist society where the workers ruled.

The communists were always ready to take active measures to "help nature along," and the religious arena was no exception. As a practical matter, the Soviet authorities developed three long-range strategies designed to sap the church's vitality: interrupt the church's cycle of regeneration, confine the church to rites performed in church sanctuaries out of sight, and indoctrinate the people in atheism.

The church, like all human institutions, must renew itself with each new generation. The communists believed that the interruption of this process would ultimately eradicate religious practice and belief. One might use the analogy of a disease that the authorities wished to wipe out. This is not the way the communists expressed themselves, and they never did develop a wholly satisfactory rationale for the persistence of religion in socialist society. ²³ The analogy of disease, however, may clarify what the communist authorities were trying to accomplish. Take a disease-producing organism that passes through various environments and stages in its life cycle. If one can interrupt its regeneration at any point, the malady can be overcome. ²⁴ For example, one can spray ponds with oil to kill the larvae of malaria-carrying mosquitoes rather than attempt to catch the insects on the fly.

The communist authorities tried to interrupt the cycle of religious regeneration in analogous ways. In a series of laws and decrees issued between 1918 and 1924, they forbade the organized teaching of religion to persons under the age of eighteen. ²⁵ Let the old — or even the adults in society — go to church until they die, the communists reasoned, but save tomorrow's generation from reactionary belief. The early Soviet experiments in collective institutional child-raising — away from parental and grandparental influence — were part of this effort. The communists closed all the Orthodox seminaries and theological academies. ²⁶ Let the priests grow older, they reasoned, until they die off without replacement. The publication of new copies of scripture and liturgical books was terminated in the late 1920S, with the result that the books and scriptures of every confession were ultimately reduced to "a few old, worn, torn relics." ²⁷ Church-run shops making new liturgical garments, vessels, and other supplies were closed, and the communists waited hopefully for celebrants' robes to become threadbare tatters.

A church building does not quickly wear out, but the population moves, and a ban on new church construction could be the equivalent of closing churches. The Soviets took pride in the fact that the great industrial city of Magnitogorsk was built from the ground up in the 1930s without a single church. Demographic change worked against the church. Urbanization negatively affected Orthodox practice, as workers migrated from the traditional Orthodox culture of the Soviet countryside to the "godless" cities. No less a figure than Metropolitan Kirill (Gundyaev) of Smolensk acknowledged this problem in 1988. ²⁸ If they could immobilize the churches, the communists believed, society might grow away from religion.

This poses the question of theological growth — a difficult subject. The Russian Orthodox Church asserts the immutability of doctrine, expressed in the duty of the church to preserve the faith. The Orthodox do, however, recognize the need to reinterpret church teaching for a new generation. Some even understand faith as an ever-expanding concept, like the expanding universe created around us. Nevertheless, when beleaguered, churches tend to defend themselves by resisting experimentation. The time when a rampart is being stormed is not the time for reckless innovation. It might be, however, that the short-term value of resisting debilitating change will exact a long-term price in terms of arrested development. For these reasons, the communists may have preferred an immobile church. Emelyan Yaroslavski, the founder of the League of the Militant Godless, asserted that a reformed, modernized religion might become more dangerous than the old one. Soviet officials were wary of religion "in new, refined forms." ²⁹

The Marxists' second long-term strategy was to limit the churches to the performance of the rites within the walls of the sanctuary. Again, one might use the analogy of disease. The human body may combat an invading parasite or microbe by enclosing it in a cyst, thus isolating it and protecting the surrounding organism. Encased in this shell, the parasite may live for years, or die, or become calcified, while the body continues to live. ³⁰ In a certain sense the communists tried to do the same thing, confining religion behind the doors of the churches and isolating church life from society at large.

In 1924 the communists proscribed religious assemblies and processions. ³¹ This action affected some of the oldest and most treasured practices of the church. For example, there is an ancient tradition of going to the rivers on Epiphany to bless the waters. On this solemn occasion the faithful would build great ice crosses and tables on the frozen surface of the river, after which the bishop might cast a decorated cross into the hole in the ice, and intrepid youths would plunge into the frigid currents and rescue the cross as an act of piety and fortitude.

On April 8, 1929, the authorities decreed the dissolution of lay organizations and banned church-run charitable activities, including relief of the needy. The authorities closed Orthodox medical institutions, orphanages, and homes for the mentally ill, disabled, and the old. ³² In particular, Article 17 of the decree outlawed the use of church premises for activities beyond worship, thereby prohibiting libraries, organized religious education, prayer meetings for women and young people, religious study groups, and even sewing circles. The same decree mandated that clergy do their work only on the premises of the church society employing them, meaning that it was unlawful for a priest to serve two parishes or to celebrate the sacraments in nonchurch institutions (except to aid the sick or dying). It reaffirmed that churches lacked juridical rights. Central church organs were forbidden to establish bank accounts for the deposit of free-will offerings. The decree was largely a codification of earlier dispositions, and the rigor of its enforcement varied with the times, but it stood on the books for sixty years, consistently inhibiting church activities. ³³

Priests and other religious persons were prohibited from wearing their habits in public places, a measure that removed a visual reminder of the church. ³⁴ In 1932 priests were forbidden to live in the cities. ³⁵ In 1929 a scrap metal drive for industry resulted in the communists' seizing most church bells, thereby silencing them. The remaining bells were stilled by decree. ³⁶ The atheists used these tactics to remove the sight and sound of religion from the streets of cities and the byways of the countryside. These measures were also designed to foster a perception of the church as a place where rituals were mechanically performed, and nothing more.

The abolition of religious holidays in 1923 and the institution of Sunday morning "voluntary" secular activities, such as work brigades and sporting events, were part of an effort to separate religion from the world of daily life. In 1929 the government introduced a rotating six-day workweek. This work schedule gave the people Sunday off only once in every six weeks. The new workweek fostered the isolation of the religious communities, which were depicted as consisting mostly of pensioners and the incapacitated. Orthodox priests adjusted their service times, but the impact was real — and resented. ³⁷

A third long-range strategy to weaken religion was the communists' propaganda for atheism. Beyond the secularization of schools and the prohibition of organized religious education of the young, the government amended the Russian constitution in 1929 to outlaw proselytizing. The constitution of 1918 had given both atheists and believers the right to propagate their beliefs, but the 1929 amendment gave the right of propaganda to the atheists and allowed the believers only the opportunity to profess their beliefs and engage in worship. The 1936 Stalin constitution gave them only the right to worship. ³⁸

In the early years the thrust of atheist propaganda tended to be crude and political, although early Marxist leaders such as Anatoli Lunacharski and Lenin himself were intellectually impressive men. Lunacharski and other antireligious leaders were not afraid to engage clerics in open debate in those optimistic, uninhibited, and experimental days of the communist movement. Nevertheless, militant godless propagandists were more often blunt and coarse. In their enthusiasm, Bolshevik governmental leaders ordered the opening of reliquaries on March 1, 1919, and in August of 1920 ordered "the complete liquidation of the cult of corpses and mummies" by transferring these relics to state museums. The atheists tried to expose the "incorruptible" remains of saints as mere rotting bones and wax figures. In one museum showcase they exhibited the relic of a saint side by side with a mummified rat. ³⁹

In the early 1920s the communists tried to prove that the Russian Orthodox Church was the instrument of a corrupt, reactionary, and treacherous clergy. They accused priests and bishops of usury, black marketeering, and seditious collaboration with the anti-Bolshevik White Guards in the civil war. On a personal level, priests were depicted as licentious, sadistic, and depraved. A few clerics truly were immoral, of course, but not many raped small girls or sodomized altar boys as the propaganda would have had one believe. ⁴⁰

By the mid-1920s the propaganda began to change. With Tikhon's "confession" and Sergi's declaration of loyalty in 1927, the church's open defiance of communist power essentially came to an end. For their part, communist leaders began to discourage mocking parades and carnivals as counterproductive. Competition between priest-blessed and scientifically seeded grain plots became more characteristic of the atheists' efforts than actions to force open reliquaries. After complaints in the antireligious press that the believers made the unbelievers look foolish in debates, open confrontations of this kind mostly ceased. ⁴¹

The wave of violence in 1929 and 1930 and the famine that ensued produced a reversion. The League of the Militant Godless pushed its membership up to 5.5 million by 1932. The league's magazine, Bezbozhnik [The Godless], was supplemented by an array of atheist publications, traveling cinemas, antireligious "universities," godless shock brigades, godless collective farms, and proliferating antireligious museums. Mocking plays, songs, and carnivals reappeared. ⁴² The school curriculum, which had previously been essentially secular, became sharply antireligious. ⁴³

As the 1930s progressed, godless propaganda evolved into the form it retained until the late 1980s. Public attention was directed to the medical hazards said to be caused by religious practice, including the spreading of disease through drinking from a common spoon and cup in communion and by kissing icons. ⁴⁴ For example, in 1972 a U.S. apologist for the official Soviet position described the scene at the Trinity-Sergius monastery in Zagorsk as follows: "With a rag the priest periodically wipes the spittle from the pure silver coffin [of St. Sergius] . . . as pilgrims, mostly older women and mothers with their children, continue passionately to kiss the coffin." ⁴⁵ The Soviet press recounted stories of babies dying of pneumonia after baptism by immersion. ⁴⁶

Even so, there was a trend away from ridiculing believers. Some observers believe that the avoidance of provocative, flamboyant, antireligious acts caused the ideological campaign to sink into gray formlessness. The antireligious museums came to emit a distinct air of boredom. ⁴⁷ Despite its dissemination of at least 100 million copies of antireligious literature, the League of the Militant Godless lost almost two-thirds of its membership between 1932 and 1938. ⁴⁸

The third great wave of church closings began in 1936 at the time of the great purges. The official crackdown was given additional impetus by the discovery, jolting to atheist leaders and propagandists, that religious belief was not dying away as Marxist doctrine predicted that it must. The 1937 census had a question on religion, and the results, which were leaked to informed circles and the West, showed that over half the people in the country — two-thirds of the population in the villages and a third of the urban population — still considered themselves believers. Stalin had decreed in 1932 that the church was to be eradicated in five years, which would have been in 1937, and yet the census had revealed a "deplorable" persistence of belief. The authorities' reaction was to intensify repression. ⁴⁹

The archives of the Soviet government's Council for Religious Affairs provide fragmentary data on the rising numbers of church closings in 1937 and 1938, then a slackening of the intensity of the antireligious drive between 1939 and 1941. ⁵⁰ William Fletcher also noted that the 1937-1938 attack became a bit more relaxed after 1938, at least with respect to underground religious activity. ⁵¹ One must add, however, that the easing in the number of church closings after 1938 may simply have reflected the fact that there were so few churches left to close.

Like the earlier two waves of church closings, the 1936-1938 campaign was very much a part of the general upheaval in society, which had ripped away all veneer of normalcy and restraint. The terror, the executions, and the growth of the labor camps in Siberia and in European Russia (i.e., Russia west of the Urals) were felt by everyone.

It may be remembered that on December 1, 1934, a shot in the back had killed the Leningrad Communist Party chief, Sergei M. Kirov. The circumstances of the murder lent credence to the probability that it was Stalin himself who had inspired the deed. Nevertheless, while "investigating" the crime, Stalin had the secret police interrogate and torture an ever-widening circle of people. Of the members of the Central Committee of the Communist Party elected at the 1934 congress, more than two-thirds had perished by 1938. In the great purge trials, the towering figures of Lenin's time were forced to confess treasonous crimes, and most were executed. The commander in chief of the army, every officer who commanded a military district or an army corps, almost every division commander, and close to half of the 75,000 Red Army officers were arrested or shot. An estimated 19 million Soviet citizens died in the terror. The police (NKVD) became the largest employer in the USSR, responsible for a sixth of all new construction in the country. ⁵²

An understanding of the suffering inflicted on the whole citizenry of the USSR truly does help make clear what the Russian Orthodox Church was also going through and why there were no longer mighty armies of peasants able to hold off the militant godless as they tried to close the churches. And close the churches they did — and arrest the priests and incarcerate the bishops and exile the believers to the GULAG Archipelago. By the late 1930s, 80,000 Orthodox clerics, monks, and nuns reportedly had lost their lives at the hands of the Bolsheviks. This figure represents about half the total number of clerics, monks, and nuns serving before the 1917 revolution. ⁵³

In the late 1930s, there were only four active bishops in the USSR. ⁵⁴ In addition to Metropolitan Sergi, the church's acting head, there were Metropolitan Aleksi (Simanski) of Leningrad, his suffragan, Nikolai (Yarushevich), and Metropolitan Sergi (Voskresenski). Anatoli Levitin-Krasnov, the Orthodox dissident writer, described Aleksi's and Nikolai's situation: Aleksi's suffragan, Bishop Nikolai of Peterhof (the future Metropolitan), used to keep by him at home a small bag with two changes of clothes, two sheets and a towel — in case he was arrested. I think Metropolitan Aleksi also had a similar bag at home. Every two or three months brought some kind of unpleasant surprise — the arrest of a group of priests. By 1937 there were only fifteen of them left in the whole of the Leningrad region, whereas in 1930 they had numbered more than a thousand. In the spring of 1937 the metropolitan was turned out of his rooms . . . and found shelter for himself in the bell tower of the Prince Vladimir Cathedral in the cramped and gloomy accommodation formerly occupied by the caretakers. Metropolitan Aleksi took church services along with Archdeacon Verzilin, the only deacon left in Leningrad. After Verzilin's death in 1938 he celebrated without a deacon. . . . I remember once, as I was walking along Nevsky Prospect . . . I noticed the metropolitan clad in civilian garb. A threadbare light-weight overcoat, galoshes, an ordinary grey cap — all this, in conjunction with his aristocratic face and subtle elegance of gesture, gave him the appearance of a bankrupt landlord. As I passed I made him a deep bow and the metropolitan acknowledged it with a slight nod. He was very resigned. ⁵⁵

The church was perilously close to demise, given the canonical need for an unbroken apostolic succession — bishops were essential for the continuation of both a line of hierarchs and of priests. The police might have carried off the remaining openly functioning bishops in a single night. Why did Stalin not order the police to do so? Probably he had some concern for the likely international reaction and some desire to maintain the facade of freedom of worship, as declared in the "Stalin constitution" of 1936. In any case, those four bishops were spared.

What about church premises? There were about 50,000 churches before the Bolshevik revolution — or close to 80,000 functioning church establishments if one counted chapels, convent churches, institutional prayer houses, and so on. ⁵⁶ According to journalist Walter Kolarz, "By July 1937 not a single church remained open in Byelorussia." ⁵⁷ Yuri Degtyarev, an authoritative spokesman of the Soviet government and Communist Party, wrote that there were no open churches at all in more than a third of the seventy-odd regions (oblasts) of the Russian Federated Republic; in another third, each region had no more than five churches. ⁵⁸ Six regions in Ukraine had no open churches at all, and three regions had only one church each. ⁵⁹ In 1939 those nine regions constituted most of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. A well-known specialist on Ukrainian churches, Bohdan R. Bociurkiw, confirmed Degtyarev's range of numbers; he reported fewer than a dozen Orthodox parishes intact in the whole of Ukraine before World War II. ⁶⁰ In the great Ukrainian diocese of Kiev, which had more than 1,600 churches before the 1917 revolution, the occupying Germans found two churches that had been functioning under the Soviets, one at the edge of the city of Kiev and one in the countryside. ⁶¹ One church was said to be open in the Ukrainian diocese of Zhitomir. ⁶² The Germans found one church in the city of Odessa, where there had once been forty-eight churches. ⁶³

Nikita Struve, another expert on Russian Orthodox religion, described the situation in the diocese of Rostov-on-Don, just east of Ukraine: Its archbishop, Seraphim (Silichev), had been exiled to the far north in 1930, where he soon died. Shortly afterwards, his Vicar, Mgr. Nicholas Ammasisky, was sent to the steppes of Astrakhan to graze a flock of sheep. In 1938 he was again arrested and this time shot, but miraculously recovered from his wounds. Meanwhile, the authorities continued to close the churches. In Rostov itself, even the former Cathedral of St. Nicholas was transformed into a zoo; the new Cathedral of St. Alexander Nevsky was razed to the ground; the huge Church of All Saints turned into a workshop, and the Greek Church became an antireligious museum. . . . Throughout the whole province, one single church, served by a very old priest, was still functioning in a village close to Taganrog. ⁶⁴

In the northern territories near Leningrad, an Orthodox mission team from Latvia followed the advancing Germans in 1941 and found only two functioning churches in that immense and populous territory. ⁶⁵

In the whole of the Soviet Union in 1939, there were only 200-300 open churches. ⁶⁶ This figure has been compiled from reports of no churches open in Byelorussia (Kolarz) and "less than a dozen" in Ukraine (Bociurkiw). There were fifteen to twenty churches in the city of Moscow, five in Leningrad, and a few more in the hinterlands of the two capitals, for a total of 150-200 in the Russian republic (Degtyarev's figures). ⁶⁷ There were, in addition, a few Russian Orthodox churches in Central Asia and in the Caucasus. This adds up to 200-300 churches nationwide.

The situation of the priests was little better. The Germans found three active priests in the two functioning churches in the diocese of Kiev (compared to 1,435 priests before the revolution). ⁶⁸ In the Ukrainian city of Kamenets-Podolski, the advancing Germans found one aged priest holding services, and the mission team from Latvia found two priests "reduced to complete impoverishment" in the area south of Leningrad. ⁶⁹

To complete this description of the church's travail, I recount the story of Metropolitan Sergi's removal from Moscow after the German invasion in 1941. As Hitler's armies approached, Stalin decided to evacuate most of the leaders of the religious communities, no doubt fearing that they might defect, or that the Germans could turn the Soviet churchmen to their own political purposes if they were captured. In fact, the decision to evacuate these men rather than kill them may have been sheer luck, as the Soviets in retreat had frequently executed people in such circumstances. Reportedly Sergi drew up a will on October 12, two days before he was sent east from Moscow. ⁷⁰

On October 14 the authorities rounded up Metropolitan Sergi and the other leaders of religious communities and — as A. Krasnov of the Renovationist church described it — crowded them all into a railroad carriage. There were Renovationist church hierarchs with some family members, a bearded old gentleman with one eye who was the Old Believer archbishop of Moscow and All Russia, some modestly dressed leaders of the Baptist community, and then "into the compartment came a medium-tall, old man with a broad, thick, grey beard, gold pince-nez, and a facial tic. He was dressed in a cassock and wore a monastic skullcap." It was Sergi, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, seen off by Nikolai and accompanied by Archpriest N. F. Kolchitski. ⁷¹

About 600 kilometers east of Moscow, during a trip that had already lasted days, Sergi became quite sick. As Wassilij Alexeev described it, Sergi developed a fever of 104° and drifted in and out of delirium. According to Krasnov, some medical people examined Sergi and had the railroad car redirected to Ulyanovsk rather than to the original destination of Orenburg, which was 600 kilometers still farther to the east. Somewhat later, a violent quarrel broke out between two of the sons of a Renovationist hierarch, and all the sick old metropolitan could do was to press himself still deeper into a corner of the compartment. ⁷²

Finally the train reached Ulyanovsk, which Krasnov described as "for two years the Russian Vatican, the religious capital" of the country. It was a quiet, sleepy town, "with almost no factories, no tram lines, and automobiles one could count on one's fingers." ⁷³

According to Alexeev, "Sergi was met . . . only by the chairman of the local Orthodox parish society. . . . Not even a group of believers met him. . . . There was no place for him to live . . . and he stayed for a few days in a railroad car. . . . Sergi sent . . . to a neighboring town to get church keys, organize a church society of twenty persons and start services. . . . When Sergi arrived, church activity had been virtually suspended." ⁷⁴

Krasnov's description was similar: "There was one little cemetery church, hardly more than a chapel, at which a young monastic priest of doubtful reputation and uncertain ecclesiastical loyalty was serving. It became the first 'pitiful outpost' of the Moscow Patriarchate in the region. Sergi did not even have a place to stay." Kolchitski and others "began feverish efforts to find a suitable church." Krasnov continued: standing . . . but long in disuse. They had deteriorated to the point of being beyond any quick restoration to tolerable condition, particularly in wartime circumstances. . . . Finally [Kolchitski and the others] took over the former Roman Catholic parish church with an auxiliary premises where the parish priest had once lived. Soon the little church was opened under the imposing name of the Kazan Cathedral, and [Sergi] . . . moved into the former apartment of the priest. ⁷⁵

It is said that Sergi had very little disposable income. The story is told that on one occasion Sergi wanted to give money to someone in need but could find none, so he gave his watch instead. ⁷⁶

The light of the "candle in the wind" of the Russian Orthodox Church still shone forth to Soviet people and to the world, but for all too many Soviet citizens who were far from any church or priest it must have flickered in the distance, beckoning elusively from afar, with the ever-present danger that the flame might be extinguished by a single order from that former seminarian, Joseph Stalin.

Whatever Harm the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between Germany and the Soviet Union did to Europe and the world, it rescued the institution of the Russian Orthodox Church. Hitler's deal with Stalin allowed the Soviets to occupy eastern Poland, and 1,200 Orthodox parishes were incorporated into the Soviet Union as a result. ¹ Then, in mid-June of 1940, the Soviets occupied Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, among whose 6 million people were almost a half million traditionally Orthodox persons who worshiped in about 300 Orthodox churches. ² Later in the same month the Soviets compelled the Romanians to cede Bessarabia and northern Bukovina with their 4 million people, 3 million of them traditionally Orthodox. There were between 2,000 and 2,500 parishes in these formerly Romanian lands. These annexations brought the Russian Orthodox Church more than 6 million traditionally Orthodox people and 3,500-4,000 churches with active priests, as well as many monasteries and nunneries, some bishops and seminaries, and other resources. The institutional strength of the church must have increased fifteen fold.

The communists soon started closing churches and arresting priests and lay Christians in the newly acquired lands, but they also understood that the Russian Orthodox Church could be an instrument of assimilation and of Soviet control. ³ It was no accident that two of the only four surviving active Russian Orthodox bishops were sent to the annexed territories. Metropolitan Sergi (Voskresenski) was sent to Riga, and Nikolai (Yarushevich), Aleksi's former suffragan in Leningrad, was sent as exarch for western Ukraine and Byelorussia. ⁴ The communists soon began the process of Russifying defiant separatist religious communities and suppressing Ukrainian, Byelorussian, and Baltic nationalists allied with non-Soviet church hierarchs. In this sense the interests of the beleaguered church and the Soviet authorities had elements in common. The result was that the draconian Soviet attack on all religious manifestations, which was still going on in the "old" Soviet territories, was only partially extended to these newly acquired western lands, and religious institutions in those areas largely survived.

In August of 1941 the Soviet embassy in London released exact figures on the number of functioning churches in the Soviet Union on the eve of Hitler's June attack. Apparently the Soviets did this to counter criticism of Soviet religious suppression voiced by their newly acquired British allies, but the press release backfired because Westerners were impressed with the paucity of the numbers rather than their magnitude. Little did they know how low pre-September 1939 figures would have been.

The figures for the Orthodox and Renovationists (mostly the Living Church) were 4,225 churches and 37 convents (monasteries and nunneries). ⁵ The separatist Renovationists had already been much reduced by 1941, and almost all those remaining rejoined the patriarchal church over the next several years. Therefore, the 4,225 churches could effectively be regarded as Orthodox, and over 90 percent of them were in the lands annexed in 1939-1940. ⁶

When Hitler launched his invasion, German forces advanced with great speed along a thousand-mile front stretching from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea. As already described, Orthodox priests came in their wake and opened churches, to the joy and gratitude of believers. Initially the German soldiers were welcomed by many in the populace with the traditional bread and salt of hospitality, and Stalin apparently began to fear that Orthodox Christianity might become a weapon of the invaders against a reeling, staggering Soviet defense. Metropolitan Sergi had been quick to rally believers to the defense of the motherland, however, and the Nazi Germans' arrogance and brutality soon began to alienate the peoples in the Wehrmacht's path. ⁷

Long-occupied lands experienced a much greater religious revival during World War II than those briefly occupied or close to the front lines. For example, the advancing Germans found one church in each of the cities of Kiev and Kharkov. In Kiev, occupied three years and generally far behind the lines, believers opened twenty-five churches during the course of the occupation. In Kharkov, always close to the battle lines and much fought over, believers opened only two churches. ⁸

Life for the surviving Orthodox people in areas under continuing Soviet rule remained extremely hard, particularly in the blockaded city of Leningrad. During the siege, the priest and deacon at the Transfiguration Church lived in the church's cellar. At the Cathedral of St. Nicholas, an eyewitness reported: Metropolitan Aleksi courageously walked in procession with an icon around the church even during air raids. . . . In the meantime the members of the Cathedral choir were dying, one-by-one, until the choirmaster himself collapsed and died in the middle of a church service. . . . The three surviving women in the choir grew so weak that they could no longer climb to the choir loft, but they continued to sing as best they could from a low platform in the sanctuary (the kliros). . . . Aleksi himself was wasting away, looking increasingly waxy. A novice monk named Yevlagi foraged just enough food to keep the Metropolitan alive. . . . Another witness, Nikolai Uspenski, reported passing by the Cathedral one day. He saw an older man struggling to clear enough snow to make a walkway to the church. It was Aleksi. Nikolai joined in to help, and Aleksi invited him to reestablish the choir, which by then had expired. . . . The last remaining deacon in Leningrad continued to serve until he, too, died. Thereafter Aleksi celebrated the liturgy alone. ⁹

Soviet government policy toward the Russian Orthodox Church was changing, albeit slowly. Antireligious propaganda stopped, and the League of the Militant Godless was dissolved in September of 1941. A small number of churches were reopened in late 1941 around Ulyanovsk where Metropolitan Sergi had set up church headquarters after his evacuation from Moscow. Soon bishops were consecrated and a few churches opened in Saratov, Orenburg, Kuibyshev, and other places east of Moscow. ¹⁰ This was not a large-scale development; Alexeev estimated that no more than a few dozen churches were able to open their doors. ¹¹ In the spring of 1942 the church leadership consisted of three metropolitans — Sergi (Stragorodski), Aleksi (Simanski) and Nikolai (Yarushevich) — and eight active diocesan bishops. ¹² In January of 1943 Sergi obtained Stalin's written permission to open a bank account to handle the church's collections in support of the Red Army. The church's fortunes continued to improve, and in March of 1943 Bishop Luka (Voino-Yasenetski) happily wrote his son that a church had been opened in the distant Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk, where the bishop, who was still technically a religious detainee, was serving as chief surgeon at a military hospital. ¹³

On September 4, 1943, Stalin received Metropolitans Sergi, Aleksi, and Nikolai in the Kremlin. A Soviet writer with access to the record of the meeting reported that Stalin met earlier in the day with Georgi Malenkov, Lavrenti Beria, and Georgi G. Karpov, an NKVD general who would later become head of the Soviet government's Council for Russian Orthodox Church Affairs. ¹⁴ Stalin wanted to ensure that the church would not stray from government control, and he had asked whether he should receive the three church hierarchs. His aides endorsed the idea, and the churchmen responded to the summons that same day. Stalin was accompanied at the meeting by Vyacheslav Molotov and Karpov.

Stalin assented to Sergi's request for a church council to elect a patriarch. When the clerics proposed a date weeks later, Stalin asked, "Why so slow?" Stalin ultimately offered some transportation and financial support to solve the church's severe logistical problems. ¹⁵ Four days after the meeting, a national church council of nineteen bishops elected Sergi as patriarch. ¹⁶ At the meeting with Stalin, Aleksi and Sergi also requested permission to organize theological courses for priests, the aim being later establishment of seminaries and academies. Stalin said: "Go straight to seminaries and academies — but it's your business!" The churchmen asked for permission to set up shops and candle factories, to publish a monthly journal, to open new churches, to consecrate bishops, and to ordain more priests. Stalin assented. The churchmen sought authorization for a part of parish and diocesan receipts to be given to the central church administration and for the inclusion of priests in parish executive organs. Stalin did not object. The hierarchs then turned to less "convenient" questions, including the fate of imprisoned hierarchs and clergy and the seizure of the living quarters of arrested priests. Stalin told the churchmen to make lists of cases and said Karpov would look into these matters. Finally Malenkov suggested that a photographer be brought in to take a photograph. Stalin responded that it was already two o'clock in the morning and "we'll do it another time." During the remaining ten years of Stalin's life, there never was another time. ¹⁷

Why did Stalin receive the hierarchs, and why did he do so when he did, more than two years after Hitler's invasion? The probable explanation starts with his limited amelioration of church policy in 1941, which was in reaction to the renaissance of church life behind German lines and his evident fear that the yearnings of Soviet believers would make them anti-Soviet activists. In the desperate months of the initial Soviet retreat and in the renewed retreats of 1942, Stalin's energies were concentrated on survival and military strategy; he probably concluded — to the extent that he thought about Sergi and his church — that additional concessions would have little effect on Sergi's already supportive public stand. By 1943, however, Stalin was thinking more about politics, and Red forces were liberating areas where newly opened Orthodox churches abounded. Soviet social control in these formerly occupied areas was partial at best, and Stalin may have felt that an indiscriminate closure of Orthodox churches would be difficult to enforce. Some sort of policy was clearly necessary, and Sergi's church was an instrument of Soviet dominance over unsubmissive Ukrainian and Byelorussian Greek-Catholics, sects, and other religious forces that had collaborated in varying degrees with the Germans. A softer policy toward the Russian Orthodox Church could reduce the incentive to organize a religious underground, which Stalin clearly did not want, and diminish unrest. Moreover, Stalin's own atheism was probably as much political and pragmatic as profoundly held. ¹⁸

In addition, as William Fletcher suggested, Stalin may have been willing to elevate Sergi to the patriarchal office in order to strengthen Sergi's hand in his struggle with the separatist Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church of Metropolitan Polykarp (Sikorski). The last thing Stalin wanted was a vigorous, independent Ukrainian church that was ready to help political nationalists longing for a non-Soviet Ukraine. The same national church council in Moscow that elevated Sergi also excommunicated Polykarp. ¹⁹

Foreign policy may also have entered into Stalin's calculations. Stalin was hoping for loans and other help from the West, and he undoubtedly was aware of Western sensitivities regarding the persecution of religion in the USSR. Stalin wanted the West to open a second front in France, and his natural political allies in England included the dean of Canterbury, Hewlett Johnson, and the archbishop of York, who was planning to lead a church delegation to Moscow. The Tehran summit meeting of Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill was in the offing. Moreover, the Russian Orthodox Church might prove useful in furthering Soviet ambitions in the Balkans and the near east after the war. Reportedly Stalin had quizzed Malenkov, Beria, and Karpov about the patriarchates of Constantinople and Jerusalem and the Orthodox churches of Romania, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia when he held his preparatory meeting on September 4,1943. In fact, Russian Orthodox hierarchs were subsequently employed in the pursuit of Stalin's goals in those areas. ²⁰

According to Russian Orthodox Church sources, after Patriarch Sergi was enthroned in September 1943, "the number of churches began to increase in both the cities and villages." ²¹ The fact that church sources were explicit in saying that the number "began" to increase in late 1943 would tend to confirm that Metropolitan Sergi had been able to open only a very few churches during his two previous years of residency in Ulyanovsk. Even after the meeting, the Soviet government hardly rushed to authorize new parishes. According to one well-placed source, Vyacheslav Molotov instructed Karpov to delay authorizing the registration of new church societies until the situation could be surveyed, recommendations submitted, and clearance obtained. Molotov was quoted as saying: "We will have to open churches in some places, but the policy is to keep the process slow." ²²

Sergi lived for eight months after his historic meeting with Stalin. During that time regular dioceses were established in Soviet territories behind the war zones, and more bishops were consecrated. An official Soviet report dated March 15, 1944, listed twenty-nine functioning bishops besides the patriarch. ²³ The Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate resumed publication. ²⁴

Metropolitan Sergi died on May 15, 1944, and Metropolitan Aleksi of Leningrad became acting head of the church. The opening of churches continued, as did the consecration of new bishops and the ordination of pious laymen as priests. Priests in hiding or detention increasingly were able to return to their clerical duties. Many priests who had opened churches under the German occupation continued to serve.

A pastoral school and theological institute opened in Moscow in June 1944, a development that reversed the total prohibition of such institutions that had been in effect since the beginning of the 1930s. In August of 1944 Karpov stated that the number of Orthodox churches exceeded the prewar figure. By that time Soviet troops had already pushed the Germans out of pre-1939 Soviet territories and were fast reconquering the lands annexed in 1939 and 1940. Most of the functioning parishes were in these formerly occupied lands. In late November of 1944 Aleksi reported to a council of bishops that "over two hundred churches" had been opened in the USSR in the year after Sergi had been enthroned; no doubt he was referring to churches in the Soviet heartland. Two Soviet government decrees, one at the end of 1944 and another in mid-1945, authorized the turning over of 300 more churches to the Orthodox. ²⁵

On January 31,1945, a national church council convened in Moscow and unanimously elected Aleksi as the new patriarch. Of the forty-two bishops then in the country, forty-one were in attendance; Archbishop Luka (Voino-Yasenetski), then of Tambov, was not invited as a consequence of his objection to the uncanonical presentation of a single candidate for patriarch. ²⁶

A Soviet government decree of August 22, 1945, implemented Stalin's 1943 decision to grant the church significant attributes of a "legal person." The church could thereafter lease, construct, and purchase houses (but not the land under them), own and operate vehicles, and establish shops for the manufacture of candles and religious objects. Local authorities were instructed to provide the church with necessary materials for building and repair, and the ban on ringing church bells was eased. ²⁷ By April of 1946 the church's hierarchy consisted of a patriarch, four metropolitans, twenty-one archbishops, and thirty-six bishops, a total of sixty-two. ²⁸

By that April, two and a half years after Stalin received Sergi, the continuity of the patriarchate had been reaffirmed and a patriarchal residence and central administration in Moscow had been reestablished. ²⁹ A church governing a handful of dioceses in the central USSR had grown to more than fifty sees spread throughout the country; a few dozen churches had become a few thousand; the supply of priests had increased greatly; the Renovationist schism had disappeared; seminaries and theological academies had reopened; and convents in annexed territories and some reconstituted under German occupation had been able to renew the cloistered life of monks and nuns in the USSR. In some ways the church remained beleaguered, but the contrast between its situation in 1939 and its condition in 1946 was immense.

The recovery and expansion of the church's institutional strength continued until 1948, a year that marked a high point for the immediate postwar period. There were six components of the church's institutional strength in 1948. The first of them consisted of the 200-300 churches and the beleaguered company of priests and hierarchs that had survived the persecutions of the first decades of communist rule. The second source of renewed strength was the government-permitted opportunity to open churches in territories never occupied by the Germans. An inspector of the Council for Russian Orthodox Church Affairs reported that 1,270 churches were opened in these lands between 1944 and 1947, most of them in the Russian Federated Republic. ³⁰ Thus 1,600-1,700 churches must have been functioning in these areas in 1947. ³¹ Most of the clergy who staffed these churches were priests obliged to take secular employment in the 1930s, clerics forced into hiding or taken to labor camps, and pious laymen with experience as psalmists or readers who could be ordained as deacons and priests.

The third component in Orthodox institutional strength consisted of the resources acquired in the 1939-1940 annexations. The Soviets lost these lands, churches, priests, and people in the weeks that followed the German invasion in 1941, but they reacquired the territories, most of the churches (those not destroyed), some of the priests, and most of the people before the end of 1944. Of the 3,500-4,000 parishes acquired in the 1939-1940 annexations, 3,000-3,200 seem to have survived into the postwar period as functioning churches. Over half of the convents that emerged from the war were located in the annexed lands. In fact, almost a quarter of the convents in the USSR after the war were located in the single diocese of Kishinev (Moldavia).

The fourth major source of renewed strength came from the prewar Soviet territories occupied by the Germans, where churches were reopened in large numbers. In the diocese of Kiev alone, between 700 and 800 parishes had opened in the 1941-1943 period. ³² An inspector for the Council for Russian Orthodox Church Affairs gave the figure of 7,547 churches opened in the occupied territories between 1941 and 1945. ³³ Not all of these newly opened churches stayed open, but most did. Perhaps as many as 6,000-6,200 of them survived the immediate postwar upheavals.

The fifth source of augmented strength for the Russian Orthodox Church was in territories first annexed after World War II. ³⁴ Transcarpathia, with a population approaching 1.5 million, was ceded by Czechoslovakia to the USSR on June 29, 1945. The Greek-Catholics in Transcarpathia were obliged to submit to patriarchal authority in a process that lasted several years and was characterized by widespread violence, including the assassination of the ruling Greek-Catholic bishop. ³⁵ The Russian Orthodox Church thereby became the only large overt religious community in that territory; there were 559 Orthodox churches, 407 of them former Greek-Catholic parishes. Transcarpathia emerged from the World War II period with two monasteries, four nunneries, and twelve small hermitages. ³⁶

The forced incorporation of the Greek-Catholics in Galicia was the sixth important augmentation of the church's institutional resources in the postwar period. Under conditions of great intimidation and after the arrest of the Greek Catholic hierarchy in western Ukraine, a Russian Orthodox Church council assembled in Lvov in March of 1946. In a memorandum to Stalin dated March 15, 1945, Karpov had complained about Orthodox passivity in the "fight with Catholicism," and Stalin no doubt made the decision personally to convene the council. Soviet government and NKVD agents organized the meeting. ³⁷ The result was the forced conversion of almost 2,500 Greek-Catholic parishes to Russian Orthodoxy. ³⁸ Virtually all of these were incorporated into what are now the dioceses of Lvov, Ternopol, and Ivano-Frankovsk. In addition, the few remaining Greek-Catholic parishes in Byelorussia were absorbed into the Russian Orthodox establishment. ³⁹ Orthodox spokesmen subsequently gave the figure of "about 3,000" Greek-Catholic parishes as the number joining Orthodoxy in Byelorussia and western Ukraine, including Transcarpathia. ⁴⁰

The total for these six components of Russian Orthodox Church strength is a median figure of slightly more than 14,000 churches in January of 1947. This correlates closely with figures declassified in the late 1980s from the official archives of the Soviet government's Council for Religious Affairs. The council recorded 14,039 registered church societies or parishes on January 1, 1947. Its figure in early 1946 was 10,504 registered church societies. ⁴¹ The difference reflects the almost 3,000 Greek-Catholic parishes added to the Orthodox rolls in 1946 and the continuing, although slackening, registration of new church societies throughout the country.

For January 1, 1945, the council recorded 14,100 church societies, or roughly 3,500 more than in January of 1946. There are several reasons for the apparent decline in 1945. First, the January 1945 figure was rounded, whereas other council figures over the years were invariably expressed in exact numbers. The council's commissioner for Ukraine submitted a report during this period in which he stated candidly that his records were unreliable and incomplete. The central authorities in Moscow were also estimating the number of rural churches and priests in the country in the 1945 period. ⁴² The 1945 figure can therefore be considered a rough estimate that was corrected in the course of 1945.

Moreover, some churches opened during the German occupation were denied registration and had to close after the war. Many hundreds of priests had fled with the retreating Axis troops, leaving parishes vacant. Both Soviet regulations and Orthodox canons denied standing to a church without a priest, and the authorities deregistered quite a number of parishes on this basis. The Soviet government also decreed that arrangements made under the German occupation were invalid. Churches opened under the Germans fell under this proscription, which was enforced in some cases. As already mentioned, the Ukrainian Autocephalous Church of Archbishop Polykarp, which had opened about 500 churches in Ukraine, came under heavy Soviet government and Russian Orthodox attack as a "Fascist" body; some of its churches were closed (and others were turned over to the Orthodox). ⁴³ Further, a council inspector noted that less than half of the churches in Poltava Oblast under the German occupation in 1941 and 1942 were registered by the council after the war because the other communities of believers failed to get the "necessary documents." ⁴⁴ The council's records contain frequent notations that churches were closed because there was "no priest," because the church was "not active," or because the church society was unable to collect the required "documents" of eligibility to remain open.

New registrations continued on a reduced scale under more restrictive ground rules through 1947 and into 1948. The number of officially registered parishes in January 1948 was 14,329, an increase of about 300 registered parishes over the previous year. ⁴⁵ The 1949 figure of 14,421 parishes documented an additional increase of slightly fewer than 100, these concentrated almost entirely in Ukraine and Byelorussia. Most communities of believers had to submit repeated petitions before getting registration. ⁴⁶ An indication of the degree to which authorizations were cautiously handled and reluctantly approved was a report by a council inspector in early 1948 who noted that the believers in a town he was visiting had submitted fifteen petitions to register their parish in the period since the war. ⁴⁷

As for the priests, the Russian Orthodox Church emerged from the war with an acute shortage of clerics in the western lands, which is where most of the churches were. The Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate reported that for two years after the Soviet expulsion of the Germans from Moldavia in August 1944, the bishop of Kishinev dedicated his full efforts to filling parishes left vacant by priests who had fled or to finding worthy priests for parishes led by canonically unqualified persons. In those two years, approximately half the parishes were successfully supplied with qualified priests. ⁴⁸ The same reality was identified by the Council for Russian Orthodox Church Affairs, which in April 1946 recorded 269 registered priests for the 582 churches in Moldavia. ⁴⁹ The Baltic states had a similar problem, even if on a smaller scale. Had there been enough priests available in the western lands between 1944 and 1947, 1,000-2,000 parishes that were denied registration after the war might have remained open.

The image that emerges from the foregoing description is a Russian Orthodox Church rescued from its institutional agony by the infusion of resources after the Soviet Union's territorial annexations and by the religiously permissive policies of the German occupation forces, which in turn caused the Soviet government to become more permissive. Forces set in motion between 1939 and 1943 caused a great strengthening of the church. Nevertheless, the material institution of the church still fell far short of the resources and strength it had commanded before the Bolshevik revolution or even during the 1920s and early 1930s. ⁵⁰

The imbalances in terms of nationality and geography made the anomaly of the church's situation striking. The Russian Orthodox Church had become a predominantly Ukrainian institution, as almost two-thirds of its parishes were in Ukraine. If the parishes in Byelorussia, the Baltic states, and former Romanian Bessarabia are included, more than 80 percent of church parishes were in western lands annexed in 1939 and 1940 or occupied by the Germans during World War II. As one of the council's inspectors noted, in January of 1948 Ukraine had 78 percent of the churches located there in 1914; the Russian republic had 5 percent. ⁵¹ The geographic imbalance was similar in terms of monks, monasteries, nuns, and nunneries. Moreover, 20 percent of the Russian Orthodox parishes in the USSR had been seized from the Ukrainian Greek-Catholics. There were more formerly Greek-Catholic churches in the Russian Orthodox Church institution than there were Russian Orthodox churches over the length and breadth of the immense Russian Federated Republic. About half of the churches in the country were in territories that had not been part of the Soviet Union in early 1939. This increased the usefulness of the church to the Soviet government as an instrument of Russification, but it also increased the church's vulnerability. Inevitably it would find itself in the cross fire as tensions over nationality grew. One can understand why Orthodox hierarchs have been so sensitive when Ukrainian GreekCatholics and Catholics throughout the world have pressed the issue of religious liberty and the right of Ukrainian Greek-Catholics to the same opportunity to worship that the Soviet constitution extended to other religious communities.

In 1948 Stalin's apparent benevolence turned once again to official hostility. What Bohdan Bociurkiw described as a "golden era" of Russian Orthodox Church expansion came to an end. ⁵²

In the pages that follow, an examination of the number of functioning Orthodox churches in the USSR in the late 1940s and 1950s forms a considerable part of the material I present. Why have I emphasized what are, in the last analysis, bricks, stones, mortar, wood, and nails? The answer is that the performance of the liturgy in a physically extant church is crucially important in Orthodoxy. The rite is the Russian Orthodox Church's glory. A thousand years ago, as the earliest Russian Chronicle tells it, Prince Vladimir sent emissaries to observe the Muslim Bulgars, the Catholic Germans, and the Orthodox Greeks. His delegates returned with unflattering comments about the Bulgars and the Catholics, but when they worshipped with the Orthodox Greeks, "we knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth. For on earth there is no such splendor nor such beauty." ¹

Contemporary Orthodox people have the same view. Metropolitan Vladimir (Sabodan) described a Christian's experience in church: "For us believers our presence in church is truly an encounter with God, a meeting with the saints, represented visibly in the form of icons. . . . The very architecture of the church, the brightly burning candles, and the painting on the walls in clear and clean tones, call forth . . . joy and hope, and . . . radiant reflections." ²

Fathers Nikolai Eshliman and Gleb Yakunin described the Orthodox church building as "indeed the house of God, the focal point of church life, the spiritual table which feeds the faithful with the incorruptible gifts of divine grace." ³ Anatoli Levitin-Krasnov said: "Every church is the most precious thing in the whole world, it is washed with the believers' tears." ⁴

The transcending importance of the physical church and of the liturgy celebrated there constitutes both a strength and a vulnerability. When the churches are closed, the loss is all the greater. Soviet sociologists reported that Orthodox believers who migrated to towns that had no church found their commitment weakening and ultimately dissipating. ⁵ No doubt the observers were biased, but it is nevertheless critical for the Orthodox believer to be able to get to a church, at least occasionally.

With characteristic eloquence, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn described Russia's closed churches: They nod to each other from afar. . . . They soar to the same heaven. . . . You are never alone: the head of some bell tower will beckon to you. . . . But when you get into the village you find that not the living but the dead greeted you from afar. The crosses were knocked off the roof or twisted out of place long ago. . . . Weeds grow . . . in the cracks in the walls. . . . On the porch there are barrels of lubricating oil. . . . Or else a truck has smashed into the church doorway to pick up some sacks. . . . People were always selfish and often unkind. But the evening bells used to ring out, floating over villages, fields and woods. Reminding men that they must . . . give their time and thought to eternity. These bells . . . raised people up and prevented them from dropping down on all fours. Our forefathers gave their best; all their understanding of life they put into these stones, into these bell towers. Ram it in, Vitka, give it a bash, don't be afraid! Film show at six, dancing at eight. ⁶

The film Repentance closes with an old woman asking the film's heroine if the road they are on leads to the church. On being told that it does not, the old woman answers as she trudges off: "Oh, what good is a road if it doesn't lead to the church?" ⁷

Between 1948 and 1953, during Stalin's last five years of life, the aging dictator's policies shifted back toward repression. By January of 1954 the Russian Orthodox Church had lost about 1,000 of the slightly more than 14,400 registered parishes it had in January of 1949. Data from the archive of the Soviet government's Council for Religious Affairs are as follows for the years between January of 1947 and January of 1954, which was a little less than ten months after Stalin's death: ⁸

The Soviet government cut back sharply on new church registrations in 1948 and — except for Transcarpathia — had altogether stopped registering new churches and parishes by 1949. ⁹ The Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate lacked any report of a new parish church consecration between January of 1949 and mid-December of 1952. ¹⁰ Also in 1948, the authorities started deregistering previously accepted parishes at an increasing rate. From 1944 to 1948, deregistration of church buildings recorded in the council's archive had never exceeded 20 in a single year. In 1948 deregistrations jumped to 73; they rose to 400 in 1950 and only began to ease off in 1953, the year Stalin died. The country lost about 7 percent of its parishes. ¹¹ In 1948 the council began to record the number of churches being demolished to make the materials available for other construction. The council also began to record the conversion of church buildings to factories, workers' clubs, shops, and movie houses. Ukraine, which had about two-thirds of the churches in the whole country in 1948, accounted for approximately two-thirds of the deregistrations.

Serious problems continued in western Ukraine. In 1945 Ukrainian nationalist forces under the leadership of Stepan Bandera, a Greek-Catholic priest, had retreated to the wooded hills and battled the Red Army and Soviet security forces in a guerrilla war that lasted for several years. On September 20, 1948, supporters of the nationalist and Greek-Catholic cause assassinated Archpriest Gavriil Kostelnik, a principal organizer of the 1946 Lvov council that had forced the GreekCatholics to join Orthodoxy. ¹² Declaring the merger of the Greek-Catholic and Orthodox churches had been easier than accomplishing it, and many formerly Greek-Catholic churches ended up closed and locked. There were also numerous reports of Greek-Catholic believers and priests going secretly to these churches to use them for religious services. ¹³

The factors that might have caused disproportionately high church closings in Ukraine as a whole were counterbalanced by relative leniency toward the Orthodox in formerly Greek-Catholic areas. More than a third of the churches in Ukraine were located in these territories, but only about a quarter of the Ukrainian deregistrations occurred there. The authorities continued to carry a large number of locked and shuttered churches on the books as registered Orthodox religious communities even though they had no priest and were inactive.

In the years after the Lvov council, the Orthodox leadership was notably permissive about what it regarded as continuing "Roman" or Latin deviations in the practices of formerly Greek-Catholic clerics. In 1950, however, Archbishop Makari (Oksiyuk) of Lvov started an "Orthodoxisation" drive, issuing a pastoral letter designed to eliminate aberrations. ¹⁴ The ensuing controversy and struggle resulted in the resignation or dismissal of additional priests and the closure of some churches. The number of registered churches in Ukraine dropped by almost 300 in 1950, more than in any other year between 1949 and 1954. ¹⁵

There were greater relative losses in central and eastern Ukraine than in the formerly Greek-Catholic territories. Most central and eastern oblasts lost 10-15 percent of their Orthodox parishes (compared to 7 percent in the whole country). Poltava oblast declined from 326 functioning churches in early 1944 to 262 after Stalin's death, a loss of about 20 percent. ¹⁶ In comparison, functioning churches in the Russian republic dropped from 3,228 in January of 1948 to 2,980 in January of 1954, a loss of 8 percent. ¹⁷

Not a single new bishop was elevated to that office in the USSR between April of 1950 and the end of 1952. Sixteen of the eighty-five monasteries and nunneries functioning in 1948 were closed down. The blessing of the waters at Epiphany, which had been permitted for a few years after the end of the war, was forbidden in 1949. ¹⁸ Publicly announced new church periodicals in Estonia and Moldavia failed to materialize. ¹⁹

Why did Stalin move again toward repression during the last five years of his life? In the first place, Hitler was defeated, the war was over, and the need for Orthodox Church support was no longer what it had been. Besides, the regime had reestablished the essentials of its pervasive prewar social control and was reasserting its hold on the life of the people. ²⁰ During these years there was a broad reversion to earlier policies, and Stalin did not exempt the church. Many Soviets had thought that the postwar period would bring a happier time when a grateful leader would strive to reward his long-suffering people for the sacrifices endured. Such false hopes disappeared as Stalin sank deeper into a mood of suspicion and bitterness. Those years of cultural suppression became known as the Zhdanovshchina (after Andrei A. Zhdanov, who was point man in the campaign against intellectuals, artists, and writers). In foreign policy, they spanned the communist coup in Czechoslovakia, the Berlin crisis, the Western airlift, and the Korean War. No sensitivity to Western opinion could have acted as a great element of restraint during those times. In 1952 the fabricated Jewish doctors' plot (in which nine physicians, most of them Jewish, at the Kremlin were accused of killing Zhdanov and other Soviet leaders) and Stalin's apparent decision to launch another great purge made a liberal religious policy even less likely.

Interestingly, the crackdown against the Orthodox Church apparently did not last in full force until the day of Stalin's death. A bishop was consecrated on March 1, 1953, four days before Stalin died, and the meeting of the Holy Synod that named this bishop reportedly was held in January of 1953. What appears to have been a new Orthodox prayer house was also consecrated on December 12, 1952; work on its foundation supposedly started the previous June. ²¹ One prayer house does not make a spring thaw, of course, and these small indications do not reveal whether the old man's hands were loosening. Another possible explanation might be connected to the work of the Orthodox Church in organizing a countrywide conference of Soviet religious leaders in May of 1952 at the Trinity-Sergius monastery in Zagorsk, at which time an intensified defense-of-peace campaign was launched. Some of the tiny church groups heard from there may have been given the chance to organize their leadership from scratch as part of the conference preparations. Perhaps the Orthodox had also been thrown a concession or two.

The fortunes of the Russian Orthodox Church brightened considerably in the period after Stalin died. Nikita Struve described it as a time of "relative freedom" that peaked in 1957 and ended in 1958. ²² In those years the Orthodox were able to publish a half dozen liturgical books, including a prayer book and a Bible. ²³ The church was allowed to consecrate eight bishops in 1953, and the number of bishops increased over the next few years and reached a high of seventy-three in 1957. ²⁴

Antireligious propaganda actually intensified for a time after Stalin's death; the peak came in the summer of 1954. ²⁵ In November, however, a resolution of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, signed by Nikita S. Khrushchev as first secretary, resulted in the toning down of the propaganda campaign. Its key passage was as follows: "Administrative measures of any kind and insulting attacks . . . can only do harm, can only lead to strengthening and even intensifying the religious convictions" of believers. ²⁶ This was not the first time such a caveat had been uttered: After the 1922 campaign the Communist Party had stated that "it is necessary to liquidate all attempts to uproot religion by administrative measures, such as the closing of churches." ²⁷ After the 1929 wave, a decree was issued stating that "the closing of churches was effected by local authorities against the will of the people" and ordering the cessation of such practices. ²⁸ Likewise, in 1939 the use of coercion in 1937 and 1938 was deplored, and party organs were advised to avoid offending the sensibilities of believers. ²⁹ As we shall see, 1954 would not be the last such word, just as it was not the first. ³⁰

The Twentieth Communist Party Congress of February 1956 and Khrushchev's Secret Speech recounting Stalin's crimes produced a faltering of dedication to Stalin's memory and to Stalinism that opened the door to a renewal of faith and a renaissance in religious commitment. Commissioners of the Council for Russian Orthodox Church Affairs began noting in their secret reports that more worshipers were going to church. ³¹ Moreover, Khrushchev's amnesties declared for millions of prisoners from the GULAG facilitated a religious boom as large numbers of clerics and dedicated believers were released from the camps and returned home. There was hardly a family in the Soviet Union that failed to experience the beneficent effects of the emptying out of the camps. It was a great emancipation of suffering millions, which reverberated throughout society. In addition, Khrushchev's liberalization of the pension system allowed many older believers to retire and worship without fear for their livelihood. ³² Religion was not dying out by itself, and it was continuing to interest considerable numbers of young people. These developments alarmed the communists. It was immediately clear to them that the revival of belief and practice contradicted the party's declared approach to communism, and some communist leaders argued that eradicating "religious prejudices" by closing churches would be easier than providing the material abundance necessary to build communism without coercion. ³³

Data from the archive of the Council for Religious Affairs indicate a remarkably stable number of registered church societies in the USSR for the period 1955-1958: ³⁴

The figures reflect an almost even balance between the registration of new parishes and parish deregistrations. Between 1954 and 1958, 121 new registrations were recorded, 60 percent of them in western Ukraine, despite the fact that less than half of the existing churches in the formerly Greek-Catholic dioceses had a regularly assigned priest. The politically motivated desire to Russify the area and provide an Orthodox alternative to the Greek-Catholics continued to rule policy. Individual inspectors of the Council for Russian Orthodox Church Affairs cited the fact that Eastern Rite Catholics were worshiping without permission as a justification for authorizing the registration of an Orthodox church in one or another of the towns they visited. ³⁶

Table 3.1, shown at the end of the chapter, presents the number of churches recorded in each diocese on January 1, 1958, just before Khrushchev's antireligious drive gathered force. ³⁷ Thirty-one dioceses, or almost half of those in the country, were in lands that the Germans never occupied. These dioceses had 1,757 churches. Thus 13 percent of the churches were in what was most of the territory of the country, an area containing roughly half of the traditionally Orthodox population. Except for the 200-300 churches that had survived through the 1930s, these were churches the Soviet government had reluctantly allowed to open, mostly between 1943 and 1947. The twelve dioceses in the Russian republic that had fallen under German occupation in World War II had 1,307 churches in 1958, almost as many as in the vastly more populous and extensive territories never occupied. Byelorussia, with over 8 million people, had 967 churches; Moldavia, with about 2.5 million traditionally Orthodox people, had 546 churches. Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, with about 2.5 million traditionally Orthodox people, had 301 churches. Central Asia and Kazakhstan had 128. Thus fourteen of the fifteen constituent republics of the USSR had 5,006 registered church societies, or 37 percent of the churches in the country. Ukraine had the rest. Of the roughly 8,500 registered church societies in Ukraine in January 1958, about 3,000 were formerly Greek-Catholic churches. ³⁸

The Orthodox hierarchs gave some statistics about the number of functioning churches. In a November 1945 interview, Metropolitan Nikolai (Yarushevich) stated that the Orthodox Church had 30,000 parishes. ³⁹ At about this same time the head of the Council for Russian Orthodox Church Affairs was saying that the church had only about half that number. ⁴⁰ In the 1945-1946 period, Patriarch Aleksi was quoted as claiming about "25,000" churches. ⁴¹ The figures were always in round thousands, as I myself pointed out in a dissertation completed in the spring of 1960. ⁴² I also calculated then that the Orthodox had many thousands of churches less in the 1950s than they were claiming publicly. ⁴³ Public claims were "20,000" to "25,000." ⁴⁴ The patriarchate avoided putting numbers in writing, although it did occasionally quote a foreign cleric giving a number. ⁴⁵ For their part, Soviet commentators tended to quote the Orthodox hierarchs, thereby dissociating themselves from the figures' accuracy. Occasionally, they contradicted church leaders, as Aleksandr Veshchikov did in 1962 when he said: "Now there remain, according to the testimony of Churchmen themselves, about 20,000" church buildings, "though these data are very exaggerated." ⁴⁶

In April 1961 the Russian Orthodox Church formally applied for membership in the World Council of Churches and was asked to list the number of its churches in the application papers. It listed "20,000 churches." ⁴⁷ By then, the government's secret archives indicated that there were no more than about 11,000 functioning churches in the country. The application also claimed 30,000 clergy, whereas government archives indicated 10,411 priests in January of 1961. Including deacons would have brought the total to only about 1,000 more. ⁴⁸ Metropolitan Nikodim (Rotov) was by then in charge of the church's international relations. One has to wonder what sensations the metropolitan had in the pit of his stomach when he was obliged to list such figures in print, in a statement so formal and so official.

Why did the church hierarchs allow themselves to be drawn into these inflated claims? Metropolitan Nikodim was wont to acknowledge cheerfully that truthfulness was not the highest consideration with him when the welfare of the Russian Orthodox Church was in the balance. ⁴⁹ Nikolai, who had earlier been forced by his relationship to the Soviet government to distort the truth on occasion, must have felt that some inflation of figures was defensible. ⁵⁰ Besides, one could count all chapels and consecrated altars in a church as "churches" and find other ways to manipulate the figures. There was considerable confusion in the 1940s and 1950s about the distinction between the number of registered Orthodox Church societies and the number of registered societies of all faiths, cults, and denominations. It was easy for an Orthodox spokesman to slip into a failure to correct such confusions and ultimately slide into an affirmation of them. The correction of them would not only have undermined the church's position, but it might also have enraged the Soviet government when the inevitable Western denunciation of Soviet persecutions ensued. In Stalin's time, virtually all Soviets knew that dissembling was the price of institutional and personal survival. One should not too readily cast stones.

In any case, the first four years of Khrushchev's time in power were years of respite for the church. The institutional losses suffered in Stalin's final years were not made up, but the religious situation stabilized. The church was gathering spiritual and human strength against the communists' ideological discomfiture after de-Stalinization and the cracking of the monolith of Soviet power in Eastern Europe and China. The communists' god was failing, although the reality of that loss of communist faith would not become wholly clear for another third of a century.

"We'll take God by the beard;" Nikita Khrushchev said in speeches, and he spoke of showing the last Christian on television by 1980. ¹ Why did Khrushchev say these things, and why did he launch the great antireligious drive? The best answer seems to be that Khrushchev really did dream of leading the USSR to full and true communism by 1980. ² He promised as much at the Twenty-first Communist Party Congress at the beginning of 1959, and atheist writers confirm that he launched the antireligious drive with this hope in mind. ³ Moreover, Khrushchev had never shrunk from coercing people.

Khrushchev's education in atheism went back a long way. As he described it, his mother and maternal grandfather had been religious, and he was brought up to kneel and pray. His favorite teacher in school was a revolutionary and an atheist, however, and she taught the boy Nikita well. He read Emile Zola and Pravda, and his youthful convictions stuck with him throughout his life. ⁴ Interestingly, Khrushchev hardly mentioned religion, other than the comments about his boyhood just described, in the thousand-plus pages of his memoirs and gave no account or explanation of his antireligious drive. Yet he was said to have had a "constant preoccupation" with religion and a personal "hatred" of it, although this judgment was disputed by at least one well-informed Soviet official. ⁵ My own guess would be that Khrushchev's vision of a breakthrough to communism is a better explanation of his actions than the presumption of a personal loathing of religious manifestations. Sometimes crude, intrinsically optimistic, and an advocate of direct action, Khrushchev may really have believed that he would be the man to lead his people to the society of his dreams. Then, later, as he sat in his country house outside Moscow recording his memoirs in gloomy retirement, I can understand why he had no stomach for describing or analyzing the reasons for his antireligious crusade.

The question of when Khrushchev's drive to close churches by the thousands really started is relevant because there are those who contend that the Russian Orthodox Church brought the church closings upon itself by a series of defiant acts in late 1959 and early 1960. The story begins in 1956, the year Khrushchev denounced Stalin's crimes. Anatoli Levitin-Krasnov, the dissident Orthodox author, asserted that Soviet ideology received a "fatal blow" at that time, even though Khrushchev himself did not realize what he had done. ⁶ This can be argued, but the events of 1956 certainly did bring soul-searching in Communist Party circles and also brought slashing attacks from the People's Republic of China on Soviet revisionism and ideological laxity. In addition, a new generation of Soviet communists needed a battle cry. ⁷ Khrushchev was soon under heavy pressure to reassert ideological leadership.

In June of 1957 Khrushchev bested his opponents in the Communist Party Presidium, branding them members of an "anti-Party group." Some observers noted that two of his adversaries, Malenkov and Bulganin, had become protective of the churches. ⁸ Reportedly, Malenkov became a practicing Christian at the end of his life. ⁹ It may also have been the case that Khrushchev's victory over his rivals freed him to pursue his ideological objectives with less restraint. ¹⁰ There were reports of a secret party meeting in Moscow in August of 1957 at which 350 theorists and activists discussed the ongoing influence of religion in the country and the party's shortcomings in antireligious education and propaganda. ¹¹

The emphasis of the communist leadership from late 1957 through 1958 was principally on ideological work, especially among the youth, and on mobilizing and training antireligious forces. ¹² The focus did not include any mass closing of churches, although the authorities began withholding permission for new episcopal consecrations. Persuasion and pressure on individual clerics resulted in the defection of some priests to the atheist cause, and these priests would play a great role in the propaganda campaign that was to come. ¹³ In 1958 the authorities eliminated military service deferments for seminary students. ¹⁴ On October 16, 1958, the Council of Ministers of the Soviet government directed its two councils for religious affairs to study and make recommendations within six months for reducing the number of functioning convents. ¹⁵ On April 2, 1959, Georgi Karpov, head of the Council for Russian Orthodox Church Affairs, advised the patriarch that the Soviet government contemplated closing twenty-eight convents and hermitages, or almost half of those functioning at the time. Soon thereafter the patriarch was obliged to instruct diocesan bishops not to allow persons under thirty years of age to enter a convent. In fact, the authorities moved against the convents somewhat earlier than they acted massively against the parish churches. Also in 1959, the authorities put the convents under heavy financial pressure by discontinuing tax exemptions on convent buildings and agricultural landholdings, a concession granted in 1945. Income taxes on convents' receipts and on diocesan enterprises, in particular shops manufacturing candles, were sharply increased. The prices at which candles could be sold were frozen. The result was a financial crunch affecting candle shops, the central administration of the church, and local parishes' ability to pay clergy, psalmists, and professionals in choirs. ¹⁶

The first slight dip in the number of registered church societies was documented in 1958. In January of 1959 there were 13,325 registered societies, go fewer than in the year before. This was the largest drop since 1954, not very significant but an omen. ¹⁷

After the plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist Party in November 1958, the media attack on religion intensified. ¹⁸ Although religion was not publicly castigated at the party's twenty-first congress in January and February of 1959, it was rumored that Khrushchev had pushed through a secret resolution calling for the elimination of religious "survivals" during the forthcoming seven-year plan. ¹⁹ Another account indicated that the decision was made by the Presidium just after the congress. ²⁰ In any case, in February of 1959 the emphasis in the propaganda campaign began to shift from the exposition of atheist arguments to pointed accusations by name against church hierarchs. ²¹ A few subsequent episcopal transfers had the look of being punitive. For example, a rising star in the hierarchy, Bishop Mikhail (Chub) of Smolensk, was transferred to Izhevsk, a small diocese west of the Urals.

The taxation affecting convents and diocesan enterprises also resulted in some bishops losing their episcopal residences, which were seized by the authorities after the dioceses failed to keep current on tax obligations. ²³ Moreover, the authorities began taxing individual priests as members of the "liberal professions" rather than as workers, driving up their taxes to the point that the government took most of their income. ²⁴

An editorial in Pravda on August 21, 1959, signaled a shift from ideological and atheistic propaganda to legislative and administrative methods. ²⁵ Toward the end of 1959, there were signs that financial pressures were resulting in the closure of parish churches. ²⁶ According to Council for Religious Affairs records, the number of registered church societies dropped by 361 churches in 1959 to bring the total down to 12,964 in January of 1960. ²⁷

The mass deregistrations of church societies in 1959 were concentrated in territories in Ukraine that had long been Soviet-ruled, were traditionally Orthodox, and had been subjected to extended German occupation in World War II. Dnepropetrovsk diocese lost 16 percent of its parishes in that single year. In the Russian republic, Rostov-on-Don lost twenty-six registered church societies, more than 10 percent of the total in that diocese. In September the archbishop of Rostov wrote Patriarch Aleksi and lamented increased official efforts to bar priests from carrying out prayers in private homes, force both parents to give written permission for a child's baptism, and bar those under eighteen from attending church. ²⁸ Throughout the Ukrainian and northern Caucasian dioceses, the shortage of priests in the late 1950s was serious, and Khrushchev's antireligious activists turned these shortages to their own purposes in deregistering churches that lacked priests.

In December of 1959 the storm broke in full force. Pravda carried an article on December 6 by a priest who was a professor of Old Testament theology at the Leningrad theological academy, Aleksandr A. Osipov. In it, Osipov renounced his religious conviction and went to the side of atheism. ²⁹ As luck would have it — and churchmen believed the timing was deliberately chosen to embarrass the church — a senior delegation from the World Council of Churches was visiting the USSR to explore the possibility of the Russian Orthodox Church joining that body. ³⁰ On December 30,1959, an outraged Holy Synod excommunicated Osipov and other priests and laymen "who had reviled the Name of God." This excommunication could have been interpreted as including the antireligious forces in general and Khrushchev himself. ³¹ The church was fighting back.

In early January 1960, the Central Committee of the Communist Party called for still more intensive antireligious propaganda. ³² Shortly thereafter, the Communist Party's Central Committee adopted a measure to curtail "illegal" housing for parish priests and the provision of vehicles for their use. ³³ On January 27, Pravda announced that the Society for the Dissemination of Political and Scientific Knowledge (which had inherited the responsibilities of the League of the Militant Godless) had held a congress attended by at least four of Khrushchev's most senior colleagues. ³⁴ Even so, the February issue of the Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate dared to publish the church's excommunication of Osipov and other apostates. Well-informed observers knew that Karpov must have been in a position to see and stop the excommunication announcement before the Journal was distributed; perhaps he was not as alert as he should have been. ³⁵

On February 16, 1960, Patriarch Aleksi delivered a speech at a Kremlin peace and disarmament conference that further enraged senior Soviet leaders. In the text, apparently drafted by Metropolitan Nikolai (Yarushevich), Aleksi claimed credit on behalf of the Russian Orthodox Church for Russia's heroic past, its glorious culture, and its leadership for peace. He decried the insults and attacks to which the church was being subjected and quoted Jesus' statement that the gates of hell shall not prevail against the church. ³⁶ On February 21, 1960, Izvestiya announced that Karpov had been replaced as head of the Council for Russian Orthodox Church Affairs and that Vladimir A. Kuroedov, a party functionary with no previous direct connection with church affairs, had succeeded him. ³⁷

Four days after Karpov's removal was made public, Patriarch Aleksi observed his patron saint's day and also the fifteenth anniversary of his enthronement. Nikolai eulogized the patriarch for his and the church's achievements in Russia and abroad, omitting the usual obeisance to the great role of the Soviet state. In his reply, Aleksi made pointed reference to the "griefs" inflicted on the church by the "enemies of God." ³⁸

The authorities continued their administrative measures against the church, perhaps both as part of their accelerating antireligious campaign and in retribution for Nikolai's and Aleksi's perceived defiance. The cathedral in the city of

Perm was closed in February with the explanation that the crowds milling outside the church constituted a traffic hazard. ³⁹ Believers were harassed at Easter services in a number of cities. ⁴⁰ It also became unlawful to have baptismal chapels in buildings separate from the parish churches. ⁴¹ The theological seminary at Kiev was notified that it must close. ⁴²

On June 15, 1960, Kuroedov reportedly told the patriarch that the church's passivity on the international front was reprehensible. According to Soviet government archives, he said: "In recent years the patriarchate has not carried out a single powerful initiative to unite other Orthodox churches around the Russian Church" — in marked contrast to the pope's reactionary activities and the slanderous propaganda elaborated abroad about the religious situation in the USSR. Kuroedov particularly blamed Metropolitan Nikolai for inaction and suggested that the patriarch remove him. ⁴³

On June 21, 1960, the Holy Synod duly relieved Metropolitan Nikolai of his duties as head of the church's Office of Foreign Religious Affairs. ⁴⁴ Then, on September 19, 1960, the Holy Synod "accepted" Nikolai's "request" to retire from his functions as metropolitan of Krutitsy and Kolomna. ⁴⁵ Shortly thereafter Nikolai wrote to a leader of the international peace movement and described his situation as "forced inaction. . . . I shall no longer be able to take part in any activity, or celebrate the liturgy, or publish anything." Apparently he was living under virtual house arrest and was kept from contact with believers on those few occasions when he was allowed to celebrate the liturgy. Fifteen months after his removal, Nikolai died at Botkin hospital in Moscow. For the last three or four weeks of his life he was under the care of a state-assigned physician. His friends, his fellow churchmen, and even his sister, who was an Orthodox nun, were barred from the hospital room. According to Nikita Struve, after his death "his naked body was left unattended in the mortuary for more than thirteen hours," and rumors that he was murdered have persisted ever since. ⁴⁶

Nikolai was not the only hierarch targeted by the authorities. Archbishop Iov (Kresovich) of Kazan was arrested, tried, and sentenced for swindling and embezzlement in mid-1960. Church sources maintained that the real reason for the archbishop's incarceration was his defiance of pressures on him to close churches in his diocese. ⁴⁷ Parish priests were also increasingly brought before the courts. Science and Religion reported in September of 1960 that twenty-six priests faced court proceedings in Orenburg oblast alone. ⁴⁸

Three months after Kuroedov had proposed Nikolai's removal, it was reported in the council's archives that "the patriarch accepted the recommendation of the Council that the Russian Orthodox Church enter into membership of the World Council of Churches." Apparently, representatives of the community of autocephalous Orthodox churches had met in Moscow in 1948 and had declared that the purposes and orientation of the international ecumenical movement were not entirely compatible with Orthodox understandings and principles. In April of 1959, Patriarch Aleksi had informed the World Council that the Russian Orthodox Church wished to strengthen its ties with that organization and send observers to its meetings but still did not favor actual membership. Nevertheless, Metropolitan Nikodim, Nikolai's successor, was an enthusiast of ecumenism, and his influence reinforced the Soviet government's inclinations. The church did join the World Council of Churches, over the opposition of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad (the Karlovcians) and some other Orthodox leaders. ⁴⁹

Reports proliferated of church closings in Ukraine, Byelorussia, and the recently annexed western lands. Pravda Ukrainy reported that seventeen churches (over 20 percent of the parishes) had closed in the Ukrainian oblast of Zaporozhe between January and June of 1960 as a result of "individual meetings with believers." ⁵⁰ Various Western reports of developments in Cherkassy oblast in Ukraine gave figures of forty to seventy churches closed before the end of 1960. ⁵¹ The journal Philosophical Sciences reported in March of 1961 that "over 500 Orthodox churches" had been closed in Ukraine. ⁵² Communist authorities in Moldavia noted with pride in December 1960 that eighteen of twenty-five churches had been closed in one raion (roughly a small county) and six of fourteen churches had been closed in another. ⁵³ Official figures were that 168 churches in Moldavia were deregistered in 1960, approximately a third of the total number (541) in that republic. ⁵⁴ There were 212 church societies deregistered in Byelorussia, down from 944 in January 1960. ⁵⁵

For the Soviet Union as a whole, an Italian journal with Vatican connections gave one of the earlier Western reports of the developing Khrushchev drive in February 1961, reporting — correctly — that "500 churches" had been closed. ⁵⁶ It also noted increasing pressure on priests and seminarians. ⁵⁷ Walter Kolarz had already written at Christmastime in 1960 that "several hundred" Orthodox churches had been closed. ⁵⁸ In a letter written in September of 1961, Francis House of the World Council of Churches noted that the propaganda drive launched "two years ago" had become an "administrative action" involving arrests and the closure of churches in the "last few months." ⁵⁹ These Western reports of church closings reveal that information was indeed filtering to the West, although most Western observers were ignoring the signs.

The year 1960 witnessed a greater drop in the number of officially registered church societies than at any time since 1945. In the Soviet Union as a whole, 1,400 churches were deregistered, a drop of about 11 percent of the total at the beginning of the year. ⁶⁰ More than half of the deregistrations took place in Ukraine, although its relative loss, 9 percent, was less than in the Soviet Union as a whole. ⁶¹

The aggregate figures for Ukraine disguise the considerable variation among sub regions. The formerly Greek-Catholic oblasts lost 114 churches, only 3.5 percent of the 3,200 parishes there. Eastern Ukraine, with fewer than half of the republic's parishes, bore the brunt of the Ukrainian church closings. Of 3,871 registered church societies in January of 1960, eastern Ukraine suffered the loss of 529 parishes, or 14 percent of those functioning at the beginning of the year. ⁶² Clearly, the authorities were continuing to be lenient with the former Greek-Catholics. In 1960 the formerly Greek-Catholic oblasts incorporated about 2 percent of the population of the USSR and about a quarter of the Orthodox churches in the country.

In early 1961 Soviet writers on atheism and official spokesmen began to use figures ranging between 11,000 and 12,000 for the number of functioning Orthodox churches in the USSR. Volodymyr K. Tancher stated in a book published in Kiev that there were "over 11,000" Orthodox churches at the time he wrote. He seems to have completed his text at the end of 1960 or early in 1961. ⁶³ Nikolai I. Yudin gave the figure of 11,500 Orthodox churches in a book that went to print in 1961. ⁶⁴ A year or so later the atheist publication Science and Religion also gave the figure of "11,000 Orthodox churches" for 1961. ⁶⁵ Council archives reveal an official figure of 11,571 registered church societies on January 1, 1961. ⁶⁶

The year 1961 brought even greater trials for the Russian Orthodox Church. A new instruction on the application of the USSR statutes for religious cults was issued on March 16, 1961, and it forbade central church authorities from offering financial help to local parishes that could not support themselves fully. ⁶⁷ Under this pressure, the church issued an instruction that parishes that could not pay their way should amalgamate with neighboring churches. The authorities then stepped in to deregister financially weak rural parishes. ⁶⁸

The authorities also ruled that only one church could remain open in a single village, that churches in the cities and towns must be substantially separated in distance from one another, and that a single priest would not be able to serve more than one church. The enforcement of all of these measures resulted in the closing of churches on a large scale. ⁶⁹ Moreover, the authorities took further advantage of the old decree that invalidated arrangements made under the German occupation and used it as an instrument to shut down quite a few churches opened during World War II in Ukraine and the western lands. ⁷⁰

The authorities put resisting priests and bishops under great pressure. The best-known case in 1961 was that of Archbishop Andrei (Sukhenko) of Chernigov, who strongly opposed the closing of churches and convents in his diocese. He was arrested and sentenced to eight years imprisonment on the charge that he had engaged in religious propaganda among some miners and had avoided paying taxes. ⁷¹ The Soviet authorities also closed down the Chernigov cathedral and other churches in the city, leaving the diocese with its episcopal seat in a small suburban church.

On March 31, 1961, Kuroedov of the Council for Russian Orthodox Church Affairs called in the patriarch and three other church hierarchs, denounced the "dicztatorial power" of parish priests, and asserted that the lay executive authority in a parish must rule. ⁷² In April of 1961 the Holy Synod, under official duress, drew up recommendations for a revision of church statutes that would transfer administrative and financial authority from the parish priest to the laity. ⁷³ The revision was then presented to a hastily convened council of bishops, which met at the Trinity-Sergius monastery on July 18, 1961. The meeting was organized in such a way as to minimize the opportunity for dissent, and the revision was approved without openly expressed opposition. ⁷⁴

The change in parish governance made the closure of churches easier, as the authorities could sometimes rely on compliant churchwardens to overcome priests' opposition. Moreover, a "reregistration" of priests was initiated after the meeting of the council. Clerics who refused to sign an agreement to uphold the revised statutes were denied renewed authorization to function. ⁷⁵ Government authorities then took advantage of Soviet regulations and church canons denying standing to a church without a priest and closed many churches where the priests had not been reregistered, had been removed, or — as already noted — had been serving the parish from another church as a second responsibility. ⁷⁶

At the Twenty-second Communist Party Congress in October of 1961, Nikita Khrushchev asserted the central importance of emancipating Soviet people from the "dreadful power" of "religious prejudices and superstitions." ⁷⁷ The congress duly issued a call for "scientific atheist education which would . . . prevent the spread of religious views." ⁷⁸

The campaign to close churches accelerated further, with most forcible closings still taking place in Ukraine, Byelorussia, and the recently annexed western lands. ⁷⁹ Science and Religion reported that 880 parishes lost their registration between July and December of 1961 with 216 of these deregistrations taking place in December alone. ⁸⁰ The total for 1961 was 1,585. ⁸¹ In Ukraine the total number of deregistrations throughout 1961 was 997. ⁸²

In 1961 there was a further crackdown on church activities such as works of charity, pilgrimages to holy places, the ringing of church bells, and the teaching of religion to children, including the children of active parishioners. ⁸³ At a Young Communist League (Komsomol) congress in 1962, the denial of parental rights to bring up children as religious believers was reiterated and given ideological justification. ⁸⁴

In 1962 Soviet government regulations were changed again to make the registration of a new church society even more difficult, if not virtually impossible, and to facilitate the authorities' efforts to close churches. The opportunity to appeal a church closing was effectively eliminated. Church closings in Ukraine reached their peak in 1962 with 1,144 church societies deregistered. ⁸⁵

At about this time, public assistance commissions were established to assist local officials in enforcing regulations limiting the practice of religion. Members of these commissions were supposed to monitor and investigate religious activities and activists, including reporting absences of workers from their jobs in order to attend church, the appearance in a parish of a priest from another place, and infractions of the rules against a priest receiving unreported income or payment in kind for performing weddings, baptisms, or funerals. ⁸⁶ Parish leaders were made personally responsible if adolescents below the age of eighteen were recruited for church work. ⁸⁷ The teaching of the catechism to young people was declared a violation of law. ⁸⁸ Ceremonies for the sick in private homes were rigorously suppressed. ⁸⁹

The drive to close churches affected quite a number of cathedral churches. The bishops' cathedrals in Orel, Kishinev, Riga, and Vinnitsa were closed in 1962. ⁹⁰ Over the course of the Khrushchev drive, at least a dozen cathedral churches were closed. ⁹¹ It was almost as if Khrushchev had told his people to get the big Orthodox churches out of the centers of the great cities and into inconspicuous corners or distant suburbs. Besides, in Khrushchev's view, it would not hurt the believers to walk a few miles or take a long trolley ride.

The first sign of a slackening in the fury of the church-closing campaign appeared in early 1963. For example, only one church in Chernovtsy diocese (northern Bukovina) was closed in 1963, whereas almost 100 churches had been deregistered there in the course of the three previous years. ⁹² In Ukraine as a whole, 526 churches were closed in 1963 (a number representing fewer than half the 1,144 churches closed in 1962), and 239 churches were closed in 1964. ⁹³

The slowing of Khrushchev's campaign was noted in the West and discussed in émigré publications. An article in Posev in early 1965 commented that churches had been closed by the thousands during the first several years of the antichurch drive, but they had been closed by the hundreds in 1964. ⁹⁴ The reasons Posev gave for the slowing tempo were believers' opposition, general popular disapproval, Western protests, and, in particular, criticism from Western communists like Palmiro Togliatti of Italy, who were politically embarrassed by the evident abuse of Soviet believers. Savelii Tuberozov, writing in the Eastern Churches Review at the end of the 1960s, estimated correctly that approximately 2,000 churches had been closed between 1962 and 1964. ⁹⁵

Soviet authorities also supplied quite accurate figures in public, although not until much later. For example, in 1987 the chairman of the Council for Religious Affairs, Konstantin Kharchev, stated that 4,219 Orthodox societies lost their registration between January 1, 1961, and January 1, 1966. Other Soviet government and atheist commentators revealed similar results in 1989. ⁹⁶

One should not conclude that the slackening pace of church closings signified a reduction in efforts to promote atheism. In fact, atheist educational efforts were intensified. By 1963 children and teenagers under the age of eighteen were being prevented, even more systematically than previously, from entering and attending church services. ⁹⁷ Leonid Ilichev, who had been leading the antireligious campaign, wrote an authoritative article in the January 1964 issue of Kommunist that urged even greater exertions, particularly against Muslims and Baptists, who were by then organizing nonregistered religious communities on an increasing scale. ⁹⁸ In that same year the scientific atheists organized an All-Union Seminar Conference on Socialist Ceremonies, where they discussed substitute rituals, such as emotionally satisfying marriage ceremonies at wedding palaces, reverential visits to the Lenin mausoleum, and socialist funerals. ⁹⁹

The losses were grievous for the institutional strength of the Russian Orthodox Church. Five of the eight theological seminaries operating in 1959 had been closed. Over two-thirds of the monasteries and nunneries were closed. ¹⁰⁰ A net figure of four out of every ten priests functioning in 1958 had retired, died, or lost authorization to serve in a parish. ¹⁰¹

table 4.1 lists the number of churches still functioning in each diocese, the number of church societies deregistered in each diocese in the eight-year period between January of 1958 and January of 1966, and the losses in each diocese expressed as a percentage of the registered church societies functioning on January 1, 1958. ¹⁰² There were 13,415 church societies in the country in 1958 and 7,466 in 1966; thus deregistrations over the eight-year period reached a total of 5,949, or 44 percent of the church societies functioning in 1958. ¹⁰³

As had been true early in the drive, the central and eastern parts of Ukraine were the areas where the Russian Orthodox Church suffered its greatest losses. Ten dioceses lost over half their churches, and two dioceses lost over three fourths of them. In the formerly Greek-Catholic lands of western Ukraine, the deregistration of parishes was under the average for the whole country. ¹⁰⁴ The relative immunity of these lands from church closure had dissipated as the Khrushchev drive progressed, but the crackdown was still somewhat less severe than it was in eastern Ukraine, no doubt for the same reasons that had previously dictated leniency. Ukraine as a whole emerged from the drive with 61 percent of the churches in the country, down slightly from 63 percent in 1958. The Russian Orthodox Church remained a mostly Ukrainian community.

The phenomenon of draconian church closings spilled over into the once German-occupied lands north of the Caucasus: Krasnodar and Rostov-on-Don dioceses lost over half of their churches. Moldavia and Byelorussia had been occupied early by the Axis powers and abandoned late in the war, and these constituent republics also lost more than half their churches. It was said that the communist authorities in Byelorussia vowed to make their republic a churchless one, and during the years of the Khrushchev drive they made considerable advances in this direction. ¹⁰⁵

In the Russian republic, besides Krasnodar and Rostov-on-Don, the greatest losses were in the Urals area — Chelyabinsk, Sverdlovsk, and Ufa — and in the diocese of Kirov (46 percent), where the church's losses were eloquently chronicled by the great dissident Orthodox layman Boris Talantov. Lower than average losses were to be found in the middle Volga area (Cheboksary, Gorki, Kostroma, and Kuibyshev), in eastern Siberia, and in dioceses like Vologda, where the number of churches was very small even before Khrushchev's antireligious drive.

Talantov described the closing of the church in Korshik in the oblast of Kirov, one of thousands of such episodes: on 21 March 1963 a workers brigade, headed by . . . [village soviet chairman Sergei] Ponomarev, visited Korshik. They began by drinking up the church wine. Fortified by it, they began to tear down the icons, hack the highly artistic carved iconostases with axes, and they used mallets to smash the precious chandeliers and other holy vessels. All the icons, the iconostases of the two side chapels of the winter church, the gonfalons and all the ancient liturgical books were burnt. . . . Vestments, linen, flour, candles, holy oil and other valuables were simply stolen. . . . Ponomarev appropriated the green paint . . . laid in . . . for painting the roof of the church. Feeling beyond retribution, Ponomarev painted his own house outside and in, so that the act of theft is irrefutably visible to all even now. . . . On 27 September 1963 he and the director of the oil factory sawed off the crosses from the top of the domes. . . . The stoves were broken, the window bars were sawn off and holes were knocked through the outside. ¹⁰⁶

In a 1988 lecture to teachers of the Higher Communist Party School, Council for Religious Affairs Chairman Konstantin Kharchev described the closing of another church where the local authorities had loaded the icons on a truck, got mired in the mud, and used the icons to try to wedge and lever the wheels of the truck out of the muck, all in plain view of outraged villagers. Kharchev noted somewhat ruefully that such displays did not help the image of the authorities or of the party. ¹¹⁰⁷ Kharchev was right. Acts of this kind perpetrated throughout the USSR in the years of Khrushchev's antireligious drive left a sickening residue in the hearts of many in the population, including some who were not believers themselves.

Yet the church presented an essentially unchanged face to the passing foreign visitor in Moscow or to the casual observer of church affairs. The celebration of the liturgy at the patriarchal Cathedral of the Epiphany was as beautiful, solemn, and resplendent as ever. The patriarch was as dazzlingly vested, deeply reverent, and inscrutable as always. Great operatic performers of the Bolshoi Theater continued to slip over to the cathedral to sing in its choir. Except for an ugly incident in 1964 when the Church of Saints Peter and Paul on Transfiguration Square was demolished to make way for a planned subway expansion, Moscow's churches — and Leningrad's churches — were little affected in any visible way. The Trinity-Sergius monastery northeast of Moscow continued to welcome pilgrims and foreign visitors with dignity, beauty, and faith. The international role and influence of the Russian Orthodox Church continued to grow. As its institutional resources at home languished, largely out of sight, its light in the world shone ever more intensely. It was a strange time.

The 1964-1982 Brezhnev era in the USSR was called the "period of stagnation" Yuri Andropov's year and three months in power between November of 1982 and February of 1984 revealed stirrings of change, but Konstantin Chernenko then returned to most of the policies of Brezhnev, and stagnation again settled across the land, lasting until Chernenko's death in March 1985. In Soviet society as a whole the Brezhnev period was characterized by corruption, cronyism, slowing economic growth, ideological rigidity, a creeping return to Stalinist attitudes, an atmosphere of cynicism, and recurring cycles of dissident activity and repression.

As the Brezhnev years slipped by, a new generation of church leadership came of age. The older generation, including the patriarch, the metropolitans, and the senior bishops, had experienced the desperate years at the edge of organizational extinction prior to World War II. These men had lived through the war, and they had led the church through the travail of Khrushchev's antireligious assault. For the most part, the rising prelates had not been obliged to face these tests, but both generations shared the dilemmas of church administration under a hostile government. Pressures to collaborate with KGB and Communist Party authorities pervaded local church, diocesan, and patriarchal offices. It was difficult for a bishop, or even a parish priest, to know the boundary line between effectiveness in bringing the sacraments to the people and the faithlessness of lost personal integrity. Divisions in the church grew, as many dissidents came to believe that a corrupted hierarchy was beginning to accept personal and psychological comfort at the cost of prophetic mission.

The period of stagnation brought slow erosion of the church's institutional resources. It was an era free of large-scale church closings and without the agonies of the Khrushchev attack, but the losses of the Khrushchev attack were not reversed and additional losses accumulated. Between January 1966 and January 1971, the number of registered Orthodox church societies fell by approximately 250, or fifty parishes a year. ¹ Gerhard Simon, a well-informed observer of Russian Orthodoxy, wrote that about fifty-five churches may have opened between 1965 and 1970, or a little more than ten a year, and the Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate did carry scattered reports of church openings. ² One might calculate that approximately ten new communities per year were registered, and approximately sixty communities a year lost registration, almost all of the latter in the western lands annexed after World War II.

The Soviet government's policy between 1965 and 1971 was driven more by events in which the Russian Orthodox Church was only tangentially involved than by the situation of the Orthodox themselves. A large segment of the Baptist community had moved to an illegal, nonregistered existence in 1961-1962. The Khrushchev campaign had led many Baptists, Muslims, Roman Catholics, and others to reject a policy of docility and compliance with repressive, secret, antireligious decrees. Khrushchev's fall from power had interrupted this tendency, but by late 1965 the Baptist initiative group — which became the Reform Baptists — had become disenchanted with the prospects for any true change in policy under Brezhnev. Elements in other religious communities did the same, but the Baptists became the main problem in the eyes of the Soviet authorities. ³ In order to improve internal coordination and strengthen the government's control over the situation — and perhaps for other internal political and bureaucratic reasons — the Soviet authorities merged the Council for Russian Orthodox Church Affairs with the Council for the Affairs of Religious Cults. ⁴

Reacting to the increase in nonregistered churches, the Soviet authorities enacted several new regulations in 1966. The first imposed fines on members of religious associations who were avoiding registration, holding unauthorized meetings and processions, and organizing forbidden youth activities. The others modified Article 142 of the penal code, mandating punishment for arousing "religious superstition" (evangelizing), for duress used in collecting moneys (asking payments for baptisms, funerals, and the like), for disregard of regulations on church registration (meeting informally), and for teaching religion to minors under the age of eighteen. Although these new measures were primarily inspired by Baptist actions, they affected the Orthodox as well. ⁵

The Central Committee of the Communist Party passed a resolution on August 14, 1967, calling for intensified atheistic propaganda. Efforts to enhance the effectiveness of education in scientific materialism continued through the remaining years of the Brezhnev era and into the Andropov and Chernenko periods. ⁶

Nevertheless, the situation of the Russian Orthodox Church in the late 196os was better than it had been under Khrushchev. A commentator writing for Posev early in 1968 reported that forcible church closings had stopped. It is clear from data discussed previously that inactive parishes in the western lands were still being deregistered, but the Posev commentary appears largely correct. The Posev reporter noted also that the authorities no longer persecuted priests indiscriminately and had ceased canceling their registrations. If a priest was needed in a diocese and wanted to go, the authorities would register him — although this situation changed for the worse in subsequent years. Further, the practice of keeping children from attending church had eased off, but priests were still barred from baptizing children outside church premises and still had to record both parents' internal passport data, thereby exposing them to harassment and reprisal. The commentator added that priests did go to people's homes to perform baptisms. They were afraid, but they went. ⁷

The 1968 "Prague Spring" in Czechoslovakia affected the Russian Orthodox Church because the Czechoslovak authorities restored the Catholic Church of the Eastern Rite in that country, and this move inspired the Ukrainian GreekCatholics in the Soviet Union to renew their efforts to obtain legal recognition. ⁸ After the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August of 1968, however, Orthodox Church leaders and the Soviet authorities moved to suppress the surviving Ukrainian Greek-Catholics and other suspected nationalist elements in western Ukraine. Much of the leadership for this renewed drive came from Metropolitan Filaret (Denisenko) of Kiev, the first true Ukrainian to occupy that post since World War II. In western Ukraine, at least, the lull described by the Posev commentator was short-lived. ⁹

To put this 1965-1970 period into the larger context of Soviet politics and dissent, the time was characterized by a seesaw battle between the emerging forces of liberty and the efforts of the KGB authorities to suppress these stirrings. The open and defiant human rights movement in the USSR was born in a public demonstration held in Moscow's Pushkin Square on December 5, 1965. Later in December two Orthodox priests, Nikolai Eshliman and Gleb Yakunin, wrote the Soviet chief of state, Nikolai Podgorny, asking that the Soviet government cease its interference in church affairs. They also wrote Orthodox leaders asking for the repeal of the 1961 revision of church statutes that had curtailed the authority of parish priests. ¹⁰ A Social Christian Union in Leningrad under the leadership of Igor Ogurtsov had already become active in 1964. ¹¹ The hand-to-hand dissemination of forbidden information (samizdat) was soon increasing markedly, as were writings spirited abroad to be published in the West and then broadcast or infiltrated back into the USSR (samizdat). In April of 1968 the Chronicle of Current Events put out its first issue. This samizdat publication reported political arrests and dissident activities, and Andrei Sakharov later hailed it as the greatest achievement of the human rights movement. In the same year a fund was established to send food, warm clothes, writing materials, books, and money to political and religious prisoners. In November of 1970 Andrei Sakharov and several other leading dissidents in Moscow founded the Committee for Human Rights in the USSR. This was the initial flowering of the human rights movement. ¹²

The KGB was not idle during these years. What one well-qualified observer, Ludmilla Alexeyeva, called "coordinated arrests" began in 1965. In what was later characterized as "a declaration of war on samizdat," Andrei Sinyavski (pen name Abram Terts) and Yuli Daniel (Nikolai Arzhak) were arrested in September. A reexpansion of the labor-camp system followed. ¹³ In 1966 Fathers Eshliman and Yakunin were suspended from their priestly functions. In 1967 the Leningrad Social Christian Union was "exposed," and most of its members were sent to the camps. Also in 1967, Vladimir Bukovski, who later documented Soviet use of psychiatric hospitals for the incarceration of political and religious prisoners, was sentenced to a prison camp. In 1969 the authorities arrested Boris Talantov, who had revealed the devastation of Khrushchev's antireligious drive in Kirov province, and they also arrested Anatoli Levitin-Krasnov, another brilliant lay Orthodox writer. In the same year the founder of the Chronicle of Current Events was apprehended. These were but a few of the arrests and trials in those years. By the end of the 1960s, according to Alexeyeva, "the KGB leadership supposed that the human rights movement was finished." ¹⁴

The human rights movement was not finished, however; nor were open religious dissidence, unauthorized religious action, religious samizdat and tamizdat, and underground worship. There was a dynamic process of action and reaction at work that drove both state policy and political and religious dissent. Repression was the authorities' reaction to dissidence, whether political or religious, and repression then drove dissent and worship underground.

In April of 1970 Patriarch Aleksi died at the age of ninety-two, and Metropolitan Pimen (Izvekov) was elected as his successor at a national church council held in late May and early June of 1971. Pimen was known to be pious and traditional and an impressive celebrant of the liturgy. He had a reserved personality, however, and was not intellectually powerful or widely regarded as strong. He had been incarcerated during the 1930s and 1940s and had served as an army officer in World War II, perhaps doing political work and concealing his monastic past. It is said that the discovery of this anomaly resulted in his removal from the army and his second incarceration. Other accounts have it that he was framed and tried for desertion, even though he had committed no crime. It is also said that Pimen's sufferings left him with a residue of vulnerability to official pressure, which was one reason the authorities supported his elevation in 1971. Nevertheless, he was the church's senior prelate and an obvious choice. Despite the criticisms of Pimen, the depth of his religious faith was not seriously questioned. ¹⁵

Between 1971 and 1975 churches continued to be closed. Newly opened churches were no more than a handful. ¹⁶ At the beginning of 1975, the leaked V. G. Furov report gave a figure of 7,062 registered Orthodox religious societies. ¹⁷ This would represent an average net decline of about thirty-five Orthodox societies a year from January 1971 to January 1975. ¹⁸

To reconcile the various statistics for churches in the Soviet Union during the Brezhnev era, it is necessary to distinguish between registered church societies and active, functioning parishes with regularly established church premises and a priest even intermittently available. Reports of operating churches rather consistently showed 300-400 fewer churches in the country than registered societies. ¹⁹

Moreover, there has always been a large difference in the western lands between churches that hold daily services with a regularly assigned priest, and churches that hold services less often because of the extreme shortage of priests. Furov's figures for Ivano-Frankovsk at the beginning of 1975 are indicative. He wrote that only half of the 364 registered parishes in the diocese held services daily (as an Orthodox church is supposed to do), 126 held services once or twice a week, 23 held services no more than four to five times a year, and 33 parishes did not hold services at all. ²⁰ In an observation consistent with Furov's data, Dimitry Konstantinov reported that only 4,000 churches in the USSR were open all the time in 1975, when there were about 7,000 church societies registered. ²¹

Although it was a time of few basic policy changes, some additional antireligious actions were taken by the Soviet government in the 1973-1975 period. In July of 1973 an educational law was passed by the USSR Supreme Soviet that placed an obligation on parents "to bring up their children in a spirit of high Communist morality." This would theoretically have obliged believing parents to raise their children as atheists, although this interpretation seems never to have been enforced. ²² Nevertheless, the official Furov report noted eighteen months later that members of parish executive committees in Byelorussia were being fined for permitting teenagers to act as godparents. The Byelorussian authorities were also fining priests for baptizing children in private homes. ²³

Further amendments to the 1929 law on religious associations were enacted in 1975; they mostly codified changes made by regulations issued over the Khrushchev and Brezhnev years. The only positive effect was to increase the opportunities for religious societies to own vehicles and other movable property. ²⁴ Additionally, the powers of the Council for Religious Affairs were enhanced, and the discretion of local soviets and other local authorities was reduced. Explicit prior permission of the council was required to register or deregister a church society, and the council acquired the power to remove even elected members of local church organizations and committees by summary action. ²⁵

In the early 1970s, the Soviet authorities continued to try — but nevertheless failed — to quench the fires of dissidence. In 1972 the authorities searched the houses of political and religious activists in Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, Vilnyus, and other cities, making numerous arrests. In those years, an eloquent priest in Moscow, Father Dmitri Dudko, was becoming widely known for his bold sermons, and in 1973 he began to conduct hugely popular question-and-answer sessions after Saturday vespers. Although transferred out of Moscow in 1974 and later transferred again, he continued his activities throughout the 1970s. ²⁶

The Chronicle of Current Events was forced to stop publication at the end of 1972, and the Committee for Human Rights in the USSR also fell silent. Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the country in February of 1974. In November 1974, Vladimir Osipov, the founding editor of the Orthodox nationalist journal Veche [Assembly], was arrested. As Alexeyeva wrote, in 1973 and 1974 both enemies and well-wishers spoke of the human rights movement "in the past tense." ²⁷ Once again, this judgment was premature, however, and the survivors fought on. The greatest of them was Andrei Sakharov, who led the human rights movement in Moscow for the next half dozen years.

In May of 1974 the Chronicle of Current Events resumed publication and the human rights movement began to recover. The 1975 Helsinki Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe gave great impetus to the dissidents' activities. Alexeyeva suggested that the publication in August 1975 of the Final Act of the Helsinki Conference, including its humanitarian articles, opened the eyes of Soviet activists to the government's international obligations. Yuri Orlov, backed by Andrei Sakharov, announced the formation of the Moscow Helsinki Watch Group. In 1976 two Orthodox laymen, Aleksandr Ogorodnikov and Vladimir Poresh, founded a Christian seminar, which united young people from a number of cities in essentially nonpolitical religious and philosophical dialogue. In December 1976 the Christian Committee for the Defense of the Rights of Religious Believers in the USSR (Christian Committee), led by Father Gleb Yakunin, released its first document. ²⁸

In the mid- 1970s the Soviet government seemed to retreat somewhat reluctantly from its policy of refusing permission for young people with a higher education to enter theological schools and become priests. The Soviet authorities had no doubt found this prohibition difficult to explain in a period when the Chronicle of Current Events was once again publishing accounts of human rights abuses, when the Helsinki Conference was pressing the Soviet Union to demonstrate greater observance of international norms, and when watch groups in the USSR were monitoring compliance. According to Dimitry Pospielovsky, the influx of highly educated young men into the seminaries resulted in a "new type" of bright young Orthodox priest coming from the intelligentsia and commanding a distinctive respect. ²⁹

The overall reaction of the authorities to the resurgent dissident movement was an intensification of repression. Yuri Orlov, Aleksandr Ginzburg, and other Helsinki Watch Group members were arrested in February of 1977. ³⁰ Anatoli Shcharanski was arrested in March. Aleksandr Ogorodnikov was arrested in 1978, and the arrest of other members of the Christian seminar, including Vladimir Poresh, followed. Father Gleb Yakunin was arrested on November 1, 1979, and Father Dmitri Dudko was arrested in January of 1980. During the same month Andrei Sakharov was exiled from Moscow to virtual house arrest in Gorki. Repression continued through Brezhnev's last years in office. ³¹

Father Sergei Zheludkov, the saintly priest and dissident writer from the outskirts of Pskov, was a voice the Soviet authorities had long tried to still but had failed to silence. Driven from his parish but not intimidated, Father Sergei remained active until shortly before he died of cancer following surgery in a Moscow hospital on the night of January 29-30, 1984. ³²

In the five years between 1976 and 1981, the number of registered Orthodox societies stabilized. This did not mean that church closings in the western lands stopped, but closings there were partially counterbalanced by the registration of new communities in the rest of the country. Overall, about sixty church societies were deregistered in those years and thirty new societies were inscribed. ³³

The 1978-1980 period was the best time during the 1970s and early to mid1980s for the authorization of new Orthodox communities, and the Soviets were most benevolent in Siberia and Central Asia and to a lesser extent the Volga region. ³⁴ Probably the reason Soviet authorities were modestly responsive to believers' desires in the remote regions of Asia was to accommodate Russian settlers and to promote Russification in politically and strategically sensitive nonRussian areas. ³⁵

Various observers have noted that defiant or underground religious activity gives the authorities an incentive to ease up on overt, tractable religious institutions. It is likely that the activities of nationalist religious movements, the Helsinki Watch Group, and the Orthodox dissident movement stimulated the modest 1978-1980 change in policy that permitted Russian Orthodox Church societies to be registered in greater numbers once again after the hiatus of the earlier 1970s. In any case, official Soviet policy toward the church did soften during those years. ³⁶

In 1980 the Russian Orthodox Church leadership began to think seriously about commemorating the millennium of the baptism of Rus in 988. In December of 1980 the Holy Synod founded a Jubilee Committee, and the authorities were modestly supportive. ³⁷ In January of 1981 the rate at which clergy were taxed on their income was cut slightly. ³⁸ During Brezhnev's last months of life in 1982, the sick and aging leader authorized the Council for Religious Affairs to turn over to the church the historic Danilov monastery complex so it could be rehabilitated to become the central headquarters of the patriarchate during the celebration of the Millennium. ³⁹ This did not mean, however, that the repression of dissidents stopped. If anything it intensified in the early 1980s. As a Leningrad religious activist put it, "The first half of the 1980s was distinguished by the harsh repression of all dissenters, including the believers." ⁴⁰

Ambiguities reflecting a Soviet leadership in flux characterized the early 1980s. The authorities tightened up once again on authorizations for new Orthodox Church communities, and deregistrations increased. During the first half of the 1980s, an average of two new church societies were registered each year, most of them east of the Urals. Deregistrations were running at about 40 per year, almost all of them in the western lands, and net losses were approximately 200 between January 1981 and January 1986. ⁴¹ In contrast to the ongoing police repression of religious dissidents and the continuing administrative measures directed against the church, antireligious propaganda languished. The cadre of atheist writers got progressively older, and few competent new authors appeared. After the mid1970s party ideologues relied increasingly on translations from abroad, reprints of articles written during the 1960s, and reminiscences of doddering heroes of the atheist movement. Science and Religion and other antireligious publications gave a dwindling readership esoteric articles on obscure religious and mythological phenomena and mildly sympathetic exhortations to protect believers' legal rights and respect their sensibilities. Doctrinal atheism as an intellectual vehicle in motion was running out of gas. ⁴²

Brezhnev caught his death of cold — literally — standing in the bitter chill atop Lenin's mausoleum on November 7, 1982. Three days later he was dead. His successor, Yuri Andropov, had long headed the KGB and was no kinder to the religious communities than Brezhnev had been. Keston College researchers concluded that the treatment of these people became "even harsher," as Orthodox laypersons who possessed Christian literature or met in study and discussion groups were repressed. ⁴³ In February 1984 Andropov himself died, succumbing to kidney disease and other ailments. At his funeral his wife was observed making the sign of the cross over the coffin. ⁴⁴

Konstantin Chernenko, an even more elderly and infirm leader, succeeded Andropov. He had been Brezhnev's dedicated lieutenant and staff officer for many years and was a living embodiment of the era of stagnation. In July 1984, Pravda called for a more active battle against religion and the "prejudices and fraud that are the weapons of the church.' ⁴⁵

The retirement in late 1984 of the aged chief of the Soviet government's Council for Religious Affairs, Vladimir Kuroedov, portended no perceptible change in policy. His successor, Konstantin Kharchev, a former party secretary in the Soviet maritime provinces and then ambassador in Guyana, had little previous experience in religious or even antireligious work. ⁴⁶ He told an interviewer later that he was unacquainted with the Bible when he assumed office, although it must be said for Kharchev that renewed work on a law to regularize church-state relations began at about the time he took up his duties. ⁴⁷

Chernenko's infirmities worsened. For the last few months of his public life he had to be supported by aides as he stood, and his last public appearance was in December of 1984, less than a year after his accession to office. He made two more appearances on television, probably staged in a hospital, and died on March 10, 1985.

The country was ready for change and vigorous leadership, and a few in power even wondered whether the church might have some role in the moral and ethical restoration of a nation clearly gone astray.

Table 5.1 shows the number of registered Russian Orthodox Church societies in each diocese on January 1, 1986, at the end of the era of stagnation. ⁴⁸ Increases and decreases in the number of parishes in each diocese during the twenty years after January 1, 1966, are also shown. During those two decades, 724 church societies, net, were deregistered; this number reduced the total Orthodox parishes by about 10 percent. Roughly half of the losses were in the historically Orthodox regions of Ukraine, and an additional quarter of them were in regions of western Ukraine where Eastern Rite Catholics had predominated prior to the Lvov council of 1946. Most of the rest were in dioceses south of Moscow occupied by the Germans in World War II, in Byelorussia (Belarus), in Moldavia (Moldova), and in the Baltic states. There were scattered increases in the number of functioning parishes in Siberia, Kazakhstan, and a few other places, but these were more than offset by scattered losses throughout the Russian republic.

Table 5.2 is a list of the average number of traditionally Orthodox people served per church, diocese by diocese. ⁴⁹ Table 5.3 shows the same data displayed by region. It is almost as if the USSR had a geological tilt from east to west — the country's modest supply of churches collected in the west, the vast stretches of Siberia virtually high and dry. The five immense dioceses in the Russian republic east of the Urals were averaging 250,000-400,000 traditionally Orthodox people per parish. In Central Asia an average parish served 75,000-100,000 traditionally Orthodox people, and in European Russia the average was about 70,000. In central and eastern Ukraine — except for Dnepropetrovsk and Simferopol, which suffered Draconian church closings in the Khrushchev drive — the dioceses were serving fewer than 50,000 people per parish, and in formerly Greek-Catholic areas of western Ukraine an average parish was serving fewer than 4,000 people. The extreme variation from east to west was consistent and dramatic.

As the Millennium approached, 59 percent of all the parishes in the USSR were still to be found in Ukraine. If the other western lands (Byelorussia, the Baltic states, and Moldavia) are included, the total rises to over 70 percent. Only slightly more than 2,000 functioning churches could be found in all of the vast Russian republic and in Central Asia and Kazakhstan. The legacy of World War II still lingered, and functioning Orthodox churches in territories never occupied by Hitler's armies remained few and far between. The era of stagnation remained generally in the pattern of earlier times.

For two decades and more, the period of stagnation in the country, mostly under Leonid Brezhnev's sclerotic hand, was reflected in apparent stability. The situation of the church was not so stable as it looked, however, as a slow, inexorable erosion of its position was continuing. The Brezhnev era began as Khrushchev's all-out assault was ending, so additional losses were registered against that already drastically lowered condition. Continuing population shifts were leaving more and more areas without churches, including burgeoning industrial cities where new churches were being neither authorized nor built.

The number of priests had declined by almost a thousand between 1966 and 1985; the number of monks, nuns, and novices, already reduced to about 13,00 at the end of the Khrushchev drive, had dropped by about 100. Church attendance slowly declined. Intellectual life in the church seemed to languish, focusing on the distant past and devoting little attention to current issues and contemporary social concerns. The published minutes of the Holy Synod gave the impression of excruciating attention to foreign delegations and international church politics and of little visible attention to internal church problems and the possibility of vigorous action to meet them. Those looking for patriarchal leadership perceived a vacuum. Aleksi had been in his late eighties when Brezhnev took power, and his private secretary was alleged to have run the church in the last years before the patriarch died. ⁵⁰ Pimen grew more removed, less vigorous, and more clearly infirm as the nineteen years of his patriarchal service progressed.

The smell of collaboration with the communist authorities, if not submission to them, hung over the church's episcopal administration. Many of the most courageous dissident priests and Orthodox laymen were in prison camps, driven from the country, or dead. The underground church was feeling the brunt of intense KGB suppression. Religious division and dissension in Ukraine were rising.

The accumulated impact of the foregoing developments was an impression that the era of stagnation was becoming a creeping threat to the church's continuing institutional viability. The slow process in motion was designed ultimately to destroy the church, and — unless arrested — it might have done so. The 1980s did not have the stark drama of the church's crisis of survival in 1939, but the trend lines pointed down. One had to wonder, as in the case of an endangered species in the animal kingdom, when the critical aggregation, or level of viability, might be passed, below which the dynamic of life would work against survival rather than for it.

A second dramatic turnaround in the fortunes of the Russian Orthodox Church occurred during the Gorbachev era. By the close of 1988, the millennial year, over 800 newly opened parishes had been registered; new monasteries and nunneries had been established; seminaries, theological training institutes, and schools for psalmists, choir directors, and church administrators had opened. After six decades of suppression, Sunday schools, church-run charitable activities, and overt Christian study groups had reappeared. Bishops, priests, and faithful could once again march down to the rivers on Epiphany Day to bless the waters and hail the baptism of Christ.

Why did government policy change? Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev played the leading role, although he did not act alone. Changes in Soviet society and the Communist Party had left fewer dedicated atheists anywhere in party ranks. Gorbachev himself was a pragmatist, never the ideological fighter Khrushchev had been. As for Gorbachev's personal convictions, he confirmed publicly in 1989 that both he and his wife had been baptized as infants. His comment was I think that's quite normal." ¹ There was also a widely publicized story that Gorbachev's mother was a believer. ² Whatever the reason, Gorbachev, the master of the moving bottom line, was never locked into atheistic militancy and had a relatively benevolent attitude toward the church.

Early in his incumbency, Gorbachev was searching for allies to make perestroika work. He understood that his country needed a moral reawakening if the corruption and cronyism that prevailed during the Brezhnev era were ever to be curbed. A population sodden with alcohol and devoid of a work ethic could not implement perestroika. Glasnost, in Gorbachev's original conception, was less freedom of speech than it was the license to speak up and to denounce the wrongdoer and the evil done. All these goals would require higher ethical standards, and the church could help.

Even before Gorbachev assumed power, there had been an understanding in the government that the Millennium would attract immense worldwide attention. There was a touch of national pride in the attitude of communist leaders toward it. Gorbachev was seeking international approval, renewed leadership in the world peace movement, and an international impression of religious freedom in the USSR. Changed perceptions abroad might also bring much needed economic support, investment, loans, and help in building a liberalized economy. Besides, visitors to the Millennium celebrations would bring a large infusion of foreign currency. The hope of benefits from abroad resulting from changed religious policies was fused with a desire to harness religious forces at home to the wagon of perestroika and renewal.

Gorbachev took office in March of 1985, but changes in religious policy came neither right away nor in a clear line of action. New Orthodox parish registrations that year totaled exactly three, as compared to two new registrations the previous year. ³ Deregistrations outnumbered new parishes in both years, and the total number of Orthodox communities in the country continued to sink. In April of 1985, however, the party directed members not to permit the "violation of believers' feelings." ⁴ According to the head of the Council for Religious Affairs, Konstantin Kharchev, government policy on religion began to change significantly at the end of the year. ⁵ Some pro-Christian literary works were successfully published in the 1985-1986 period; several pro-church speeches were given at the Eighth Writers' Union Congress in June of 1986; and the church was praised publicly for its generous response to the Chernobyl tragedy. ⁶

In January of 1986 the Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate stated that clergy were once again permitted to officiate in parishes not their own and to call on the sick when the need arose, without the special permission previously required. Children aged ten and older could be voluntary participants in religious rites, whereas formerly one had to be eighteen. Religious societies would again be recognized as "bodies in law," a status giving them the right to own movable property. Religious associations could also draw their legal minimum of twenty members from a region broader than a single village; this made it easier for people in scattered rural communities to qualify for registration. ⁷

By some accounts, Gorbachev took church leaders aside at a Kremlin reception in November 1986 and asked that the church help the Communist Party raise the moral level of the people and assist in controlling alcoholism. ⁸ In the same month, however, Gorbachev called for "a decisive and uncompromising struggle" against religion and for the strengthening of atheistic work. ⁹ In 1986 only ten Orthodox religious societies were registered, and the pattern was — as previously — to register a few new societies in remote towns in Siberia or Central Asia. ¹⁰

The Orthodox Church, for its part, prepared for the Millennium by launching a series of international conferences. The first, held in Kiev during July of 1986, discussed the history of the church. A conference in Moscow during May 1987 focused on mission, theology, and spirituality, and the third, in Leningrad during January of 1988, addressed liturgical life and church art. This series had significance beyond the subjects addressed because of the wide international participation the conferences attracted; the openness of Orthodox theologians to the discussion of subjects previously regarded as sensitive, such as the views of émigré scholars and critics; and the presence, active participation, and scholarly contributions of Soviet intellectuals and establishment leaders not previously willing to involve themselves in church-sponsored meetings. ¹¹ There were those in both East and West who dared to hope that Eastern spirituality, suffering, piety, conviction, and sense of history might be combined with Western theological inquiry, including the reconciling of scientific thought and religious faith, to create a new force. As on Russia's great rivers in the springtime, the thaw came, and the ice began to move.

The gradual opening of more intensive contacts with the West had additional dimensions. As Soviet opposition to the importation of foreign religious literature softened, Bibles, New Testaments, and other liturgical, theological, and religious books were imported in increasing numbers, ultimately becoming a flood. As Soviet opposition to material help from abroad changed to receptivity, the world responded with building supplies, bells, crosses for the tops of cathedrals, and all manner of other practical and financial contributions. Europeans, particularly the Germans, were at least as supportive as Americans in this regard, probably more so. As barriers to foreign volunteer efforts and visitors' exchanges slowly lowered, increasing numbers of Westerners, including U.S. college students, went to work in individual Orthodox parishes, helping and building.

After a telephone call from Gorbachev in December of 1986, Andrei Sakharov was permitted to leave internal exile in Gorki and return to Moscow. The following month Gorbachev made his celebrated openness, democratization, and perestroika speech, saying that the restructuring of Soviet society was possible only through democracy and "free thought in a free country." He said this meant the "promotion of non-Party comrades to leading work." In February 1987 news came of the release from labor camps of 51 prisoners of conscience, including 9 known religious believers. A few days later it was announced that 140 prisoners had been pardoned and that the sentences of 140 more were under review. Father Gleb Yakunin and the Christian layman Aleksandr Ogorodnikov were both freed. Yakunin subsequently received a parish assignment. ¹²

As 1987 passed, reformist publications such as Moscow News, Ogonëk [Little Fire], Literaturnaya Gazeta [The Literary Gazette], and even Izvestiya and Vechernaya Moskva [Evening Moscow] began writing sympathetically about believers' rights and publicizing their struggles to have churches returned to them. Permission to publish scriptures and liturgical books in the USSR was becoming easier to obtain. Publicly expressed Soviet governmental attitudes were sounding more tolerant. ¹³

The spring of 1987 brought the optimism that accompanied these developments, but it also brought signs of renewed division within the Christian community. In April of 1987, on the first anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, Marina Kazin, a girl in the little Ukrainian town of Grushevo (Hrushiv), reported that she had seen a vision of the Virgin Mary on the balcony of a former Ukrainian Greek-Catholic chapel in the village. ¹⁴ Tens of thousands of people assembled, and many of them also claimed to have seen the Mother of God and to have heard the sounds of the Holy Mass coming from the empty chapel. There were also visions reported in nearby towns. Peasant folk interpreted the little girl's vision as a sign of the Virgin's concern for her suffering Catholic people and interpreted the Chernobyl disaster as a divinely ordained punishment for the forcible incorporation of the Greek-Catholics into Orthodoxy in 1946. Allegedly a half million people made the pilgrimage to the Ukrainian village in the weeks and months that followed. Greek-Catholic bishops and priests increasingly risked appearing in the open and professed their ongoing loyalty to the Holy Father in Rome. A public campaign to obtain recognition of Catholic institutions in western Ukraine steadily built strength but encountered unbending opposition from Russian Orthodox hierarchs. ¹⁵ This was not the only episode of this kind in western Ukraine after 1946, but it marked the beginning of a Catholic-Orthodox crisis that would grow in magnitude in subsequent years. ¹⁶

The record regarding new Orthodox Church societies remained unimpressive. Yuri Degtyarev of the Council for Religious Affairs reported that sixteen new Orthodox societies were registered in 1987, and other sources reported that ten church structures were turned over to believers. ¹⁷ As before, most of the new parishes were in dioceses like Novosibirsk, Sverdlovsk, and Alma Ata, although a few new church societies were authorized in European dioceses such as Kirov, Leningrad, and Smolensk. Public agitation by Moscow News and other periodicals was a key factor in forcing reluctant local authorities in Kirov and elsewhere to act. ¹⁸ Deregistrations still outnumbered new registrations. As was consistently true over the years, estimates of the number of functioning churches ran several hundred below the estimates for registered church societies. For example, Paul A. Lucey gave a figure of 6,500 functioning churches in 1986-1987; the official figure for registered church societies was 6,742 in January 1986. ¹⁹

Toward the end of 1987, two monastery complexes were returned to the church, to the deep joy of the Orthodox. These were the Tolga Presentation of Mary nunnery in Yaroslavl diocese and the Optina Presentation men's hermitage in Kostroma diocese. The latter, closed in 1923, had been an inspiration to some of Russia's greatest literary figures in the nineteenth century.

Kharchev's subsequent accounts indicated that he was encountering recalcitrance from hard-liners at the Central Committee offices of the Communist Party. At the end of 1987, according to Kharchev, party propaganda director Sklyarov strongly contested Kharchev's position that the Millennium celebrations should be national in scope and tried, unsuccessfully at the time, to get Kharchev removed. Kharchev supported the church's desire to build a great new church in Moscow commemorating the Millennium, but Yegor Ligachev, then the senior party secretary for ideology, opposed him. Gorbachev supported Kharchev and overruled Ligachev. ²⁰

The great Millennium celebrations were scheduled for June of 1988, and, as the year was beginning, the public statements of Soviet government officials sounded increasingly accommodating. For example, in a January interview, Yuri Smirnov, head of the International Department of the Council for Religious Affairs, said that the Soviet authorities recognized past errors in dealing with the churches and were trying to rectify them under Gorbachev's leadership. He acknowledged that communist leaders had earlier "tried to force the masses away from religion. . . . Much has changed. The needs of believers . . . are being regarded more calmly and attentively." During the same month Kharchev spoke of a "new interpretation of the principle of freedom of conscience" and a religious policy "cleansed of all elements of bureaucracy." ²¹

In late March 1988 a meeting of Orthodox bishops was informed that the Soviet government had abolished the requirement that both parents publicly register their passports when baptizing their children. ²² Some dioceses and the patriarchate's publishing department received enlarged offices. Additional buildings were provided for the Moscow seminary, the Leningrad theological academy, and the nuns at Korets and Pyukhtitsa. The Sofrino manufacturing shops were given a parcel of land, and it was announced that the revered chapel of St. Kseniya of St. Petersburg had been returned to the church. In addition, the Easter liturgy at the patriarchal Epiphany Cathedral was broadcast live on Soviet television, apparently for the first time. The Communist Party's authoritative monthly journal, Kommunist, ran an article in its April 1988 issue softening the line on religion and admonishing party members that they should not regard the registration of a new church society as an ideological defeat. ²³

In early April of 1988, Patriarch Pimen gave a controversial interview to an Izvestiya correspondent. Although he praised the attitude of the Soviet central authorities, he sharply criticized local officials for continuing to obstruct the registration of new Orthodox communities. He observed that some "progress" was being made, noting that "sixteen" new Orthodox societies had been registered in 1987. ²⁴ This last statement must have been a deliberate effort to put pressure on the authorities, as nobody in the USSR or in the world could have believed that sixteen new church societies in the vastness of the Soviet Union could be regarded as great progress. As previously discussed, that number of new societies would not even counterbalance the number of parishes still being closed down.

Crosscurrents in communist attitudes toward the church continued, but Gorbachev remained determined in his desire to enlist Orthodox hierarchs, priests, and lay believers in support of his program. He made clear to the patriarchate that the Soviet government wanted the help of all sectors of society, including the church. ²⁵

On April 29, 1988, Gorbachev received Patriarch Pimen and five metropolitans who were members of the Holy Synod and talked with them for ninety minutes in the Kremlin. ²⁶ Gorbachev thanked the church leaders for the Russian Orthodox Church's patriotism and material contributions during World War II and for the leaders' participation in the fight for peace and against nuclear destruction. He acknowledged that Stalin and, by indirection, Khrushchev had mistreated the church and believers, and that they, like other Soviet citizens, deserved the benefits of democratization and glasnost. He also took credit on behalf of the Soviet government for the return of the Danilov, Tolga, and Optina convents and for government assistance in planning the millennial celebration. ²⁷

In his reply, Pimen somewhat pointedly added to the list of benefits that he hoped might be extended by the Soviet government, mentioning restoration of the church societies closed in the 1960s, the registration of new church societies, the opening of church edifices closed down, and the building of new churches. He further noted additional issues that still needed resolution, including the restoration of the nine dioceses closed in the 1960s, authorization for an increase in the number of monks and nuns and facilities for them, permission to expand training programs for priests, psalmists, and other church servers and to open new seminaries in Byelorussia and other constituent republics, the return to the church of the monastery of the Caves in Kiev, an increase in the allowed print runs of Bibles and other church literature, and a revision of state legislation regulating churches and cults. ²⁸ Pimen blessed Gorbachev and his labors for the welfare of the motherland. Gorbachev promised to refer the patriarch's specific requests and concerns to his colleagues for resolution. In truth, Gorbachev's government responded to the church's appeals in all of these areas.

Other accounts of the church's list of requests to Gorbachev indicate that church leaders also asked for permission to do charitable work, particularly to care for the sick and old, and requested the return of revered icons and relics from state museums. ²⁹ After the meeting, government attitudes toward church assistance to the sick, old, and infirm shifted markedly, and reports were heard from widely separated localities of priests, monks, nuns, devoted laywomen, and others performing works of mercy in clinics, hospitals, and other institutions. In some places church workers began agitating for the right to open their own religiously sponsored homes for pensioners and others who required nursing. ³⁰ The authorities returned some church treasures.

Church leaders also hoped for permission to conduct seminars and discussion groups in church, open publicly accessible church libraries, and have access to the state-owned mass media. ³¹ Clergymen did begin to appear on television. Metropolitan Aleksi (Ridiger) of Leningrad, who was elected in 1989 to the Congress of People's Deputies with Pimen and two other clerics, was able to address that assemblage and the greater Soviet public, which watched the televised proceedings from one end of the country to the other. I was in Kishinev at the time and remember the electrifying sight of the metropolitan passing down the aisle in full ecclesiastical garb to reach the podium and appeal to the nation to let the Russian Orthodox Church play its crucial role in the moral restructuring of Soviet society. ³² The patriarchate, with West German assistance, also produced a film depicting the role of the Russian Orthodox Church through the course and sweep of the country's history. In addressing the Stalinist period, the film included photographs of church martyrs and the destruction of churches. Dramatic footage showed the 1931 dynamiting of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow with the huge dome crumbling and the immense edifice falling into dust and rubble. Khram [The Church], another film that showed the Orthodox in a highly favorable light, was shown on television, also in 1988. ³³

At the end of May 1988, the bishops of the church met again, this time at the Novodevichi monastery in Moscow. They gave final approval for the celebration of the Millennium and decided on the canonization of nine new saints, including Grand Prince Dmitri Donskoi, the Russian victor over the Tatars in 1380. ³⁴

The pace of new Orthodox Church society registrations began to increase after the Pimen-Gorbachev meeting, although it was hardly a stampede. Sixty-some societies were registered between January of 1988 and the end of May — almost all of them after April 29. ³⁵ On June 7, 1988, Metropolitan Vladimir (Sabodan) gave the exact figure of 6,893 for the total number of Russian Orthodox parishes, including those located within the USSR and those located abroad. ³⁶ Thus there were slightly fewer than 6,800 registered parishes in the country in the spring of 1988. ³⁷

At roughly the same time, Metropolitan Filaret (Denisenko) of Kiev announced that the Soviet authorities had agreed to return the Far Caves and related grounds and churches of the monastery of the Caves in Kiev, and that the church would reestablish its ancient monastery there. ³⁸ Earlier, the church had publicly expressed its expectation that the entire monastery would be returned, so the dividing of the grounds and caves was widely hailed but actually something of a disappointment. ³⁹

June 1988 was the month of the celebrations. In colorful procession, Christian leaders from all over the world gathered in Moscow, Zagorsk, Kiev, and other great Orthodox centers in the USSR. On June 5 a liturgy in the patriarchal cathedral in Moscow opened the festivities, and a national council of the Russian Orthodox Church convened on June 6 at the Trinity-Sergius monastery in Zagorsk. A new church statute was adopted that restored the parish priest-in-charge to his position as head of the parish community and chairman of the parish meeting, to which the parish council would be accountable. Although application of the statute would depend on new legislation being drafted by the Soviet government, it was the first step in undoing the 1961 curtailment of the parish priest's authority. In discussing the new church statute, Metropolitan Vladimir (Sabodan) gave an example from a parish in Pskov diocese where the senior church warden had managed to get rid of twenty-five priests-in-charge in the course of his incumbency. ⁴⁰

On June 10, 1988, the Soviet government conferred decorations on the patriarch and other church leaders in the Kremlin, and the Bolshoi Theater was made available in the evening for a televised concert of church music. Raisa Gorbachev sat on the dais. The next day church leaders met with USSR president Andrei Gromyko in the Kremlin. Other publicized church services followed, including the ceremonial laying of the cornerstone of a great new church in Moscow — the one Gorbachev had authorized over Ligachev's objections. There were also commemorations in Kiev and other cities. These celebrations had a public impact never before countenanced in the seventy years of communist rule. The release of prisoners of conscience also continued. ⁴¹

In the second half of 1988, the registering of new Orthodox societies accelerated. According to Degtyarev, 809 Orthodox church societies were registered in the course of 1988, and virtually all of the registrations took place after the April 29 Pimen-Gorbachev meeting. ⁴² On January 1, 1989, there were reported to be 7,549 registered church societies in the country. ⁴³ This was about the same number of registered parishes as there had been at the end of the Khrushchev antireligious drive.

Degtyarev made clear in June 1989 that new registrations of Orthodox church societies were heavily concentrated in Ukraine, Byelorussia, and Moldavia. They were not new societies but parishes closed in the 1959-1964 drive or after it. ⁴⁴ Nikolai Kolesnik, the chairman of the Council for Religious Affairs in Ukraine, confirmed Degtyarev's breakdown, reporting that in 1988 more than 430 Orthodox churches had been turned over in Ukraine alone, the "overwhelming majority" of them in the formerly Ukrainian Greek-Catholic areas. ⁴⁵ Some of these churches given over to the Orthodox were buildings where the Greek-Catholics had continued after 1946 to hold services without authorization. ⁴⁶

Official sources reported that throughout the country 528 church buildings had been turned over in 1988 and 44 permits for new church construction had been issued, for a total of 572 buildings — 237 units short of the 809 new parish societies registered during the same period. ⁴⁷ The discrepancies were becoming larger between the number of registered societies and truly functioning parishes with available buildings and priests.

From the end of World War II through late 1990, a religious community followed a prescribed path in obtaining its registration, as it did in losing it, and the benevolence or hostility of the authorities always made a great difference at every stage. In the establishment of a new religious society, the basic legal unit responsible was an association of at least twenty laypersons, a dvadtsatka. This entity had to apply to its town (or raion) executive council for registration. The papers then passed through district authorities, constituent republic councils of ministers, and oblast or republic commissioners of the Council for Religious Affairs. ⁴⁸ Finally they reached the USSR Council for Religious Affairs for approval.

In 1988 and 1989, as already indicated, central governmental attitudes became more benevolent, but many local officials retained their personal animus against the believers and clerics they had fought for so long. Many were "conservative" apparatchiks, unenthusiastic about Gorbachev and perestroika. According to Degtyarev; the central authorities had to overturn negative recommendations of local governmental organs in fully a sixth of the applications submitted in 1988 and had to reverse between a quarter and a third of the applications from Lvov Oblast (formerly Greek-Catholic territory). In many cases local officials simply sat on the applications month after month. Four-fifths of all applications in 1988 were to reopen rural churches, and nine-tenths of the applications in Ukraine were for village parishes. ⁴⁹

When a society was registered, it might or might not get a crumbling or half ruined former church turned over to it or get a permit to build a new one. Waiting for a church could take months or years, and reconstruction and repair of a returned church structure could take more years. In the meantime, once a religious community was registered, it could usually meet in a peasant cottage or some sort of prayer house — if a priest could be found to lead it. Raising the money to repair a church was never easy, even if the bishop contributed diocesan funds, which were always in extremely short supply — although the prohibition against transferring such funds to individual parishes was no longer being enforced.

After the Millennium celebrations, the pace of beneficent change quickened. The authorities relaxed their ban on ringing church bells, which had been in effect since 1961. ⁵⁰ Although this is getting ahead of the story, on Easter of 1994 even the bells of the Kremlin's churches and towers pealed out over Moscow. Raisa Gorbachev continued to demonstrate a friendly interest in the Russian Orthodox Church. She visited the Far Caves of the Pecherskaya Lavra in Kiev on February 20, 1989, and planted a tree on the grounds, a symbolic act of support for the church. ⁵¹

As reports proliferated during 1989 of faithful Orthodox people doing charitable work in hospitals, mental institutions, old people's homes, and prisons, the hierarchs of the church embraced the cause. ⁵² In a press interview in March 1989, Patriarch Pimen observed that the possibility of the church's resuming charitable service was "particularly significant." Metropolitan Yuvenali (Poyarkov) of Krutitsy took up the cause, and Archbishop Kirill (Gundyaev) of Smolensk urged each diocese, convent, and large parish to organize a home for those who needed assistance and then to undertake broader programs of charity. He observed that the existing law did not authorize such activity but made his appeal anyway, anticipating new legislation. ⁵³ Everywhere, Orthodox activists were beginning to organize their own charitable activities and institutions. ⁵⁴

In late 1988 and early 1989, reports spread of church Sunday schools and catechism classes. They were still legally forbidden but now were tolerated. Children began to be taught from the age of five. In some cities, including Moscow, clerics organized classes in religion at public schools. Even atheist observers remarked on the dedication and fervor with which these works were undertaken. ⁵⁵

As the critical reevaluation of the Stalin era progressed apace, Orthodox leaders began, albeit hesitantly, a process of reappraisal and self-examination. In April of 1989 the Holy Synod established a commission to examine materials and documents concerning the rehabilitation of clergy and laypersons repressed in Bolshevik times. Metropolitan Vladimir (Sabodan) of Rostov chaired the committee. ⁵⁶ In one sense the establishment of the commission was an act of repentance on the part of church hierarchs who had themselves demonstrated less courage than had the martyrs awaiting rehabilitation and honor. Confronting the past would soon play a role in the church similar to the historical truth-seeking in secular politics and society.

Over 900 new societies were registered between January 1, 1989, and April 29, 1989, more than had been registered in all of 1988. Over 1,700 new societies were registered in the single year after the Pimen-Gorbachev meeting. ⁵⁷

It was spring, when blossoms and new growth break forth and the grip of snow and ice loosens — Eastertide, 1989. Easter is the great holy day of Orthodoxy, even more so than it is for the Western churches. It is the day of triumph for the faith. In one sense, Easter of 1989 also marked the triumph of the church, the first anniversary of the fateful meeting of Pimen and Gorbachev, a day when the suffering of the past was transcended and the road ahead could be surveyed with confidence. The sunlit avenues toward the future beckoned with particular warmth and clarity on that Easter Day. Opportunities for service closed to the church since Lenin's time were opening. Institutional resources were multiplying. The ranks of the clergy and of monks and nuns were filling out. Even famous atheists deplored the persecutions of the past and hailed the cultural and political contributions of Orthodoxy to the development of the Russian spirit. Although there were a few small clouds visible above the horizon, the sun shone brightly in the blue heavens.

Between the spring of 1989 and the end of 1991, the Russian Orthodox Church successfully continued the recovery of its institutional strength. Over 2,000 new Orthodox parishes were registered. Freedom-of-conscience laws put the changes begun in 1988 on new legal foundations, and after the death of its aged and ailing patriarch, the church elevated a man of high intelligence and vigor to the patriarchal throne. ¹

The church's ongoing life was not trouble-free, however, as the smallish storm clouds on the horizon gradually became larger and more menacing. The Russian language has a special word for a storm cloud, tucha, perhaps because blue skies so regularly darken into thunderclouds in that long-suffering land.

In June of 1989 Konstantin Kharchev's enemies in the Communist Party, in the Soviet government, and in some sectors of the church hierarchy caught up with him, and he was relieved of his duties as chairman of the Council for Religious Affairs. In an interview with Aleksandr Nezhny of Ogonëk, Kharchev described his troubles and presented himself as a reformer attacked by hard-line adversaries. ² He asserted that he had tried to eliminate KGB dominance of the council and to dismiss a hard-line, KGB-affiliated deputy chairman. ³ He claimed that he had favored democratically organized, multicandidate patriarchal elections. ⁴ He also said he had incurred the enmity of local communist officials by supporting the return of churches to believers. ⁵

Kharchev's interview aroused much interest in church circles, particularly because of his willingness to wash dirty linen in public. Kharchev's comments were unquestionably self-serving. He had given the church's leaders cause to regard him as a busybody, inserting himself into church matters he should have left to the bishops. Nevertheless, his dismissal was a setback for church reform and a success for the clerical "old-boy network" and its attempts to sweep past collaboration under the rug.

Kharchev's successor was Yuri Nikolaevich Khristoradnov, another Communist Party functionary with no more experience in religious affairs than Kharchev had possessed when he assumed the position in 1984. Aleksandr Nezhny described Khristoradnov as having imposed "one more humiliation" on the infirm patriarch. Apparently Khristoradnov insisted that Pimen come to his government office to conduct business, despite the fact that the patriarch was by then unable to walk. Church aides brought Pimen to Khristoradnov in a chair rigged as a litter. Khristoradnov then read previously prepared remarks and directives from a sheet of paper. The patriarch silently nodded acquiescence; his aides then carried him away. ⁶

The expansion of the range and scope of the church's activities continued. The first Orthodox religious work camp was organized in summer 1989 with young Finnish volunteers working with students at the St. Petersburg theological schools. The Council of Russian Orthodox Bishops, which met in October 1989, called for the countrywide development of charity work, education of the laity, and the establishment of diocesan publications and church libraries. The bishops also agonized over the issue of participation in the country's political life; the horns of this dilemma were an activism that compromised pastoral authority or an abstinence that led to irrelevance and a failure to be heard. A few days after the council adjourned, representatives of the church met with U.S. experts in a seminar to develop strategies to deal with pervasive alcohol abuse and the less pervasive but growing problem of drug addiction in the USSR. ⁷

Internal divisions were appearing. According to Serge Keleher, the first public effort to revive the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church was initiated by a priest of the patriarchal church serving in Lithuania, Father Bohdan Mykhailechko. The Autocephalists had been active during the 1920S prior to Stalin's suppression of them as Ukrainian separatists. They had reappeared under the German occupation of Ukraine during World War II and had been suppressed again as Nazi "collaborators" at the end of the war. On August 19, 1989, the priest-in-charge and most of his parishioners at the Church of Saints Peter and Paul in Lvov passed over to the Autocephalists, and on October 22, 1989, the Orthodox bishop of Zhitomir, Ioann (Bodnarchuk), proclaimed the reestablishment of the Autocephalous Orthodox Church throughout Ukraine and was officially excommunicated by the Russian Orthodox Church Holy Synod in consequence. ⁸

In January of 1990 a council of 168 priests and 204 Orthodox laypersons met in Ivano-Frankovsk in western Ukraine and declared their adherence to the newly reestablished church. ⁹ Scattered additional adhesions were reported, and Novoe Vremya [New Times] reported in February 1990 that "over 100 parishes" had abandoned their Russian Orthodox Church allegiance. ¹⁰ In June of 1990 the Autocephalists held a church council in Kiev. It was attended by seven bishops, over 200 priests, and several hundred lay representatives. In elections for a new patriarch, the delegates chose Metropolitan Mstyslav (Skrypnyk), the aged archbishop of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and primate of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church in the Diaspora. Because Mstyslav was denied a Soviet visa and was unable to assume his duties, Ioann was elected metropolitan and acting head of the church in Ukraine. ¹¹

The beleaguered Orthodox faced challenges on all sides. The Ukrainian GreekCatholics campaigned vigorously to obtain official recognition and to recover their former churches. On September 17, 1989, 150,000 Ukrainian Greek-Catholics gathered publicly to attend open-air services in Lvov. As darkness fell over the city, citizens placed burning candles in their windows to commemorate the victims of Stalinism and to observe the "fiftieth anniversary of the Soviet occupation of western Ukraine." On October 29, 1989, Ukrainian Greek-Catholics took control of the Transfiguration Church in Lvov, symbolically important to both Ukrainian Greek-Catholics and Orthodox because it had been the church of Father Gavriil Kostelnik, the chief clerical organizer of the 1946 Lvov council and the victim of assassination in 1948. On November 26 there was another mass demonstration of more than 100,000 believers in Lvov. In the months that followed, most of the remaining churches in Lvov and many parish churches throughout western Ukraine were occupied by Ukrainian Greek-Catholics. Each side accused the other of resorting to threats, intimidation, violence, and even religiously motivated murder. ¹² In truth, both sides engaged in violence.

The dilemma posed by the activism of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholics developed into a delicate issue in foreign policy, for both the church and the Soviet Union. Archbishop Kirill (Gundyaev) of Smolensk replaced Metropolitan Filaret (Vakhromeev) of Minsk as head of the Office of Foreign Church Relations in mid-November. ¹³ Filaret, a courageous prelate, had just been named exarch of Byelorussia and was facing the difficult task of opening hundreds of new parishes and multiplying the number of dioceses in that republic. ¹⁴ There were also negative factors that may have contributed to the advisability of moving Filaret aside. It was the eve of Gorbachev's scheduled visit to Pope John Paul II in Rome, and Filaret had urged the pope in August to ask the Ukrainian Greek-Catholics to accept reintegration into the Russian Orthodox Church, a proposal that the pope must have found unwelcome. Moreover, Filaret was reported by various sources as having taken an extremely hard line with respect to the Autocephalists. Apparently it was only with extreme difficulty that Kirill and other advisers had convinced Filaret that a public excommunication of all the Autocephalists would only advertise the Russian Orthodox Church's difficulties. ¹⁵ Last, there was a report that Filaret had suffered a psychological breakdown. ¹⁶ Kirill, on the other hand, was regarded as flexible, agile and strong — the most able of the younger bishops and highly experienced in foreign affairs. ¹⁷

Gorbachev's historic meeting with Pope John Paul II took place on December 1, 1989. While attending the Millennium celebrations in June of 1988, Agostino Cardinal Casaroli had presented Gorbachev with a letter from the pope expressing concern about the welfare of Catholics in the USSR. In partial response, the Soviet authorities returned the Roman Catholic cathedral in Vilnyus to believers in February 1989. In April they permitted the restoration of the Lithuanian hierarchy, and in July they authorized the consecration of a Catholic bishop in Byelorussia. A central question from the Vatican's point of view, however, was legalization of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church and the return of the churches seized in 1946. For his part, Gorbachev was attracted to the prestige of talking and cooperating with the pontiff and to the possibility of a papal visit to the USSR. A visit with the pope would open virtually the last closed door blocking full international acceptance. Gorbachev may also have hoped that the pontiff would convince the world that the persecution of religion in the USSR was a thing of the past, and international support and approval would then flow in.

Gorbachev probably miscalculated, not realizing the cost of the policies he agreed to before visiting the pope. Some observers believed he was asking for the pope's help in calming tensions in Ukraine and restraining the Ukrainian GreekCatholics from "pushing for a separate Ukrainian state." ¹⁸ If this was his intention, he got the opposite result. Other observers speculated that Gorbachev and his advisers thought, at least until shortly before the actual meeting, that it would not be necessary to legalize the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church as a condition for the meeting and for the establishment of relations with the Holy See.

The Vatican negotiators did get a commitment from Gorbachev to legalize the Ukrainian Greek-Catholics and to register their congregations, although there was no Soviet commitment to return the churches seized in 1946. Apparently Gorbachev made his final decision only a week before meeting the pope, and it was announced on the day they met. ¹⁹ Metropolitan Yuvenali (Poyarkov) of Krutitsy went to Italy shortly before Gorbachev's trip and stated publicly that the Russian Orthodox Church was unilaterally postponing scheduled talks with the Catholics because of what the Orthodox described as the violent "seizure" by Ukrainian Greek-Catholics of the Church of the Transfiguration in Lvov. ²⁰ This Orthodox stand did not derail Gorbachev's commitment, however, and the registration of Ukrainian Greek-Catholic religious communities commenced in 1990, although with delay and initially small numbers. ²¹ The Russian Orthodox Church establishment found itself odd man out, and felt the sting.

Throughout 1989 Soviet officials continued to release statistics on new Orthodox registrations. About 2,560 new Orthodox Church societies were registered in the course of the year to bring the total up from about 7,550 registered parishes on January 1, 1989, to 10,110 on January 1, 1990. ²² This reflected a quickening pace at which new parishes were being founded, an average of over 200 a month. The equivalent figure for late 1988 was a little over 100 a month.

As 1990 began, patriarchate and Vatican representatives met to discuss the Orthodox-Greek-Catholic crisis. ²³ Held in Moscow, the meeting lasted from January 12 to January 17. Toward the end of the sessions, Ukrainian Greek-Catholic and western Ukrainian Orthodox prelates joined in the talks. The participants agreed to establish a commission, composed of the four parties just mentioned, to decide on the disposition of churches in dispute. ²⁴ According to the Russian Orthodox Church, the rule of thumb was to be that in towns where there were two churches and a population divided between Greek-Catholics and Orthodox, one church would be given to each religious community. Where there was only one church, it would be given to the community with more adherents. ²⁵

At the end of January a bishops' council of the Russian Orthodox Church issued an appeal deploring the violence in western Ukraine and calling for a peaceful resolution of the religious conflict there. In a move to blunt the appeal of the Autocephalists and Ukrainian Greek-Catholics among nationalists and independence-minded believers in the western lands, the council also decided to set up separate — but not totally independent — Ukrainian and Byelorussian Orthodox churches. The council also liberalized rules for the use of the Ukrainian and Byelorussian vernacular in church services. ²⁶

In the meantime, both sides mobilized their supporters in Ukraine. Ivan Gel (Hel'), who had long been incarcerated for his beliefs, became chairman of the Committee for the Defense of the Ukrainian Catholic Church. Members of the nationalist Ukrainian People's Movement (RUKH) were winning governmental and legislative positions in Ukraine and mostly supported the Ukrainian GreekCatholics and the Autocephalists. District and village authorities increasingly turned over Orthodox churches to their rivals and cast a blind eye to antiOrthodox demonstrations and the invasion of Orthodox premises. Patriarch Pimen appealed to Gorbachev to "calm" the interchurch conflict. Gorbachev already had troubles enough and did nothing. In March the Republic Committee for the Defense of the Rights of Believers of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church was formed in Kiev by delegates from Lvov, Ternopol, Ivano-Frankovsk, and Transcarpathia. Their declaration deplored the activities of "national-religious Black Hundredism," a reference to the infamous persecutions of Jews and dissidents in late czarist times. ²⁷

The joint Catholic-Orthodox commission met in Kiev and Lvov March 6-13, 1990. According to the Orthodox, the disposition of a number of individual churches was agreed to without opposition, but suddenly, on the last day of the meeting, Archbishop Vladimir Sternyuk, the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic prelate, plugged in a tape recorder and announced his dissatisfaction with the proceedings, declared all decisions invalid, and withdrew. According to the Greek-Catholic side, the Orthodox discussed the disposition of a few church buildings but otherwise stalled and refused to address issues of substance. Reportedly the archbishop's withdrawal was in protest against the patriarchate's refusal to discuss the return of the Cathedral of St. Yuri (St. George) in Lvov, to acknowledge the invalidity of the 1946 Lvov council, to recognize the canonical, corporate nature of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church, and to stop accusing the Greek-Catholics of unprovoked violence. Furthermore, the Orthodox allegedly had manipulated schedules and locations to prevent believers from talking to Catholic delegates. ²⁸ A subsequent statement by the Greek-Catholics called for a Russian Orthodox Church commitment to support the rehabilitation of the Greek-Catholic Church or, in another variant, to accept the liquidation of Orthodoxy in traditionally Catholic areas of western Ukraine. ²⁹

There were indications that the Greek-Catholics were not satisfied with the support they received from representatives of the Holy See who had come from Rome to join the talks. In fact, the Greek-Catholics reportedly asked the two Vatican delegates to withdraw, and a deputy in the Ukrainian parliament publicly criticized one of them, Archbishop Stephen Sulyk of Philadelphia. ³⁰ Echoes of dissatisfaction regarding positions taken by Vatican representatives resurfaced at a meeting in West Germany several months later of the Mixed Commission for Orthodox-Roman Catholic Theological Dialogue. ³¹

The Ukrainian Greek-Catholics continued to seize churches. The IvanoFrankovsk authorities decided to transfer the Resurrection Cathedral there to the Greek-Catholics, and the Lvov City Council transferred the Cathedral of St. Yuri. The Orthodox in Lvov resisted this transfer with great passion for a number of months, but it was effected on August 19, 1990, and was celebrated with a procession in which 300,000 faithful were said to have participated. ³²

Although the popularity of the Greek-Catholics in western Ukraine was unmistakable, there was also evidence that some support for Orthodoxy, even the Orthodoxy of the patriarchal church, persisted among rank-and-file believers. Between March and June of 1990, an institute of the Soviet Academy of Sciences conducted a poll in the three traditional Greek-Catholic districts of Lvov, IvanoFrankovsk, and Ternopol. About a third of the respondents reportedly favored the Orthodox, about a fifth supported the Greek-Catholics, about a seventh endorsed the Autocephalists, and almost a third were indifferent or atheist. ³³ Considering the fact that by mid-1990 over 90 percent of the Orthodox churches in Lvov and Ivano-Frankovsk oblasts had been seized or transferred to the GreekCatholics or Autocephalists, it is probably fair to say that Ukrainian nationalist pressures were pushing the de facto situation somewhat further away from the Ukrainian Orthodox position than popular sentiment would have supported.

Orthodox-Catholic talks resumed in Moscow from September 11 to September 14, 1990. On this occasion it was the Orthodox who broke off the talks, as they were turned down in their request that the Church of the Transfiguration in Lvov, the metropolitan's chapel in Lvov, and the Resurrection Cathedral in IvanoFrankovsk be returned to them. ³⁴

Despite the fact that the Vatican was less hard-line than local Greek-Catholics, relations between the Holy See and the Orthodox markedly deteriorated. Metropolitan Filaret (Denisenko) of Kiev publicly questioned whether the Orthodox-Roman Catholic Theological Dialogue should continue, and the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church posed this issue officially after the September 1990 talks in Moscow. Subsequently, the Russian Orthodox leadership decided to restrict future activity in the dialogue, at least initially, to the question of "Uniatism." A meeting of Eastern Orthodox patriarchs in Istanbul in March 1992 condemned Catholic "proselytism," which was said to include "material enticement" and violence in the occupation of churches. ³⁵

For its part, the Soviet government continued to develop a warmer relationship with the Greek-Catholics and the Vatican. The long-exiled head of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church, Myroslav Cardinal Lubachivsky, was permitted to return to Lvov on March 30, 1991. He was met by waving, weeping crowds and "forests of blue-and-yellow Ukrainian flags." ³⁶

With the problem of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholics and the Ukrainian Autocephalists representing two fissures in the structure of Orthodoxy, a third fissure was appearing once again. This was a response from within the USSR to the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad. ³⁷ Under the new conditions, scattered Orthodox clerics and laity who were struggling against hierarchs they perceived as unjust, venal, oppressive, or compromised became aware of the church hierarchy outside the USSR. The Russian Orthodox Church Abroad became an alternative jurisdiction to which disaffected and politically affronted priests might turn.

According to patriarchal church leaders, May 1990 was the beginning of the movement toward the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad. ³⁸ It was then that Archimandrite Valentin (Rusantsov) of the Emperor Constantine Church in Suzdal appealed to Metropolitan Vitali (Ustinov), the head of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad, to accept him and his parish into its jurisdiction. Reportedly Father Valentin, a popular priest, had refused to submit police reports on his conversations with foreigners and had run for the Suzdal city soviet without his bishop's permission. Archbishop Valentin (Mishchuk), his diocesan superior, was stiff-necked in his handling of the matter. The archbishop first transferred Father Valentin to a distant parish in the Vladimir district and then forbade him to serve in Suzdal when Father Valentin refused to move. Parishioners demonstrated with signs demanding that Father Valentin stay and Archbishop Valentin be transferred, and the uproar attracted national press attention. Father Valentin was duly accepted into the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad and was soon elevated to episcopal rank. Somewhat later, the Moscow patriarchate transferred Archbishop Valentin to become archbishop of Korsun with jurisdiction over a handful of Western European churches. ³⁹

Since May of 1990, dissident clerics and their followers have passed over to the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad in at least two dozen scattered dioceses ranging from the Baltic states in the west to Khabarovsk and the Pacific maritime province. ⁴⁰ By January of 1991 almost forty parishes had changed allegiance. ⁴¹ According to spokesmen in the United States, just over fifty parishes and communities were adhering to the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad in early 1992; at the end of 1992 at least seventy functioning church societies were claimed. ⁴² By latter 1994 the number of claimed parish communities approached 100, but many of these held services irregularly in rural cottages or in a room of a small city apartment. Apparently more parishes have been newly established or have passed over than have priests, a difference adherents of the movement explain as motivated by fear and by extreme financial stringencies that prevent defecting priests from earning more than a fraction of the income they had received in the patriarchal church. ⁴³

Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Free Church, the branch within the former USSR territories of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad, are Archbishop Lazar (Zhurbenko) of Tambov (now resident outside Odessa), Bishop Valentin (Rusantsov) of Suzdal, and Bishop Veniamin (Rusalenko) of the Black Sea and the Kuban. ⁴⁴ Two or three bishops from Western and Central Europe have also been active in what is now the former Soviet Union. Territorial diocesan demarcation lines have come slowly, and defecting parishes have been relatively free to appeal to one or another of the bishops for acceptance. ⁴⁵ Although many cases of transferring parishes have involved personality conflicts between unsubmissive clerics and arrogant or maladroit bishops, an underlying issue has been widespread distrust of church hierarchs' record of collaboration with a godless regime and their perceived cowardice in failing to defend Christian rights. Without these issues of principle, the scattered cases of insubordination would have been of marginal consequence, but deeper troubles lay beneath the surface.

Journalists and commentators sympathetic to the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad have accused the patriarchate of manipulating its ties to Soviet and post-Soviet authorities in order to enlist police aid, bring force to bear, and inspire legal sleight of hand in obtaining the expulsion of Russian Orthodox Free Christians from church buildings. These allegations have no doubt been true in some cases. ⁴⁶

Some spokesmen of the patriarchal church have been gracious in their references to the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad, and the Holy Trinity monastery in Jordanville, New York, has been generous in providing books to patriarchate run theological schools. ⁴⁷ Nevertheless, a reconciliation is highly unlikely, as the conditions of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad could hardly be met by the patriarchate. These demands include (1) canonization of the "new martyrs" of Russian Orthodoxy, including Czar Nicholas II; (2) repudiation of Metropolitan Sergi's loyalty declaration and the legitimacy of Sergi's leadership of the church; (3) renunciation of membership in the World Council of Churches and ecumenical dialogue; and (4) public repentance for past collaboration with the atheist communist state and the exposure and removal of the church's most compromised clerics. ⁴⁸

Not all developments in Soviet national life were signaling troubles for the church. There were also positive changes. For example, two new laws were adopted by the Supreme Soviet of the USSR in early 1990 that gave the church significant property rights. The first of these gave religious organizations the right to tenure of land, which could be used for agriculture or forestry. This was important because — in pre-Soviet times — churches and convents had depended heavily on agricultural operations. Under the second law religious organizations could own buildings or other facilities "essential to their activities." The implementation of these two laws did not go forward unambiguously, however, and later compromises made in connection with the freedom-of-conscience bill left the status of religious property somewhat murky. Still, the two laws were a step ahead. ⁴⁹ In due course, the Soviet government also abolished its requirement that priests be approved and registered by commissioners of the Council for Religious Affairs before they could serve a parish. ⁵⁰

The year 1990 saw further development of the church's charitable work. Orthodox activists were able to establish church-run hospitals, clinics, nursery schools, social service schools, and additional homes for the poor. A contemporary version of the historic charitable society of Mary and Martha, the Christian Brotherhood of Believing Doctors, and the spiritual-evangelical society Radonezh (named after St. Sergius) were organized in Moscow. A priest in Riga established a "hot line" for people contemplating suicide, and the Brotherhood of John the

Baptist established an equivalent service in Russia. ⁵¹ The newly established Union of Orthodox Brotherhoods convened a congress in October and adopted an ambitious program for religious-moral education and charitable work. At the end of the year the Holy Synod ratified these plans and mandated staff and budgetary support for the union at the national, diocesan, and parish level. The church also planned bookstores, lecture halls, libraries, and polyclinics. Individual churches were told to develop Sunday schools, nursery schools, libraries, almshouses, kitchens for the poor, and inter-parish temperance brotherhoods. ⁵²

Patriarch Pimen (Izvekov) died on May 3, 1990. Archimandrite Sergi (Toroptsev) described Pimen's last days: The Patriarch was weak and lay in bed during the Easter service. . . . When we came to him for his blessing, there were tears in his eyes. . . .

In the evening of May 2 it was decided to give His Holiness communion. . . . Consecrated bread was brought. . . . I did not leave the old man until 3 A.M., observing his troubled sleep (he was breathing heavily) interrupted every fifteen minutes by coughing. At 8 o'clock in the morning Bishop Aleksi [Kutepov] began the liturgy. ... When we came to the bedside His Holiness . . . took communion. I raised him on his pillow and gave him a few sips of warm water.

The Patriarch had blessed the convening of the Holy Synod on May 3. . . . At 12 noon I dressed His Holiness. He lay quietly, looking with a concentrated gaze into the distance. He agreed to have tea. The first sip went well, but the second one made him cough. . . . Dinner with the Holy Synod was set for 3 P.M. . . . I helped him up and helped him into a chair by the bed. I was still holding him when suddenly his face went white and his eyes went blank. He breathed deeply three times and became quiet. Peacefully, in that way the fourteenth Patriarch went to his Lord and Maker. ⁵³

Pimen had been very isolated. As he confided once to friends, he had lived in a "golden cage," but his taciturnity had contributed to this seclusion. ⁵⁴ On occasion he had been criticized for being lazy, prone to luxury, and inactive, a clerical embodiment of the stagnation of the Brezhnev era. Allegedly he had sung in "symphony" with the country's communist regime. ⁵⁵ He was credited, however, with having saved the church from a "modernism" reminiscent of the Renovationist schism of the 1920s and a "pseudo-ecumenism" that would have embraced international Protestant "illusions" leading to "unwise" and "precipitate" theological reforms. In short, he "preserved the faith."

With his experience as a choirmaster, Pimen sustained the monastic style of church singing. Even as an old man, he had a rare voice and an "absolute musical ear." He served in church with great feeling and sustained a deep spiritual bond with the faithful. ⁵⁶ He was a gifted poet, whose verses radiated spirituality. ⁵⁷ As

Aleksandr Nezhny described the dichotomy, two natures coexisted within the man. One was the believing, praying, grieving pastor; the other was the cool, helpless, hardened witness to the "methodical torture" of the church. ⁵⁸

After Pimen's death the Holy Synod chose Metropolitan Filaret (Denisenko) of Kiev as locum tenens, or interim head of the church. ⁵⁹ It set June 6, 1990, as the date for a preliminary meeting of bishops, which would select three recommended candidates, and set June 7-8 for a national church council, which would make the final selection in secret balloting.

Some outspoken priests and journalists criticized the process for selecting delegates and the hasty convocation of the council, as it would occur even before the end of the forty-day period of mourning for Pimen. ⁶⁰ . The principal reason given for calling the national council so soon was to put the church in a position to deal quickly with the schismatic tendencies in the church. ⁶¹ A second reason was concern for stability in the face of ethnic tensions throughout the country and the uncertain political situation in the USSR, characterized by the fierce struggle between conservative hard-liners and democratic reformers. ⁶² This split was reflected within the churchs' leadership. The conservative tendencies found expression in the view that the church not only should be free but also should have a privileged status as the national church, as of old. The reformist tendency favored a true church-state separation, sometimes described as a "free church in a free state." A third suggested reason for the rapid calling of the council was fear that the perusal of Pimen's personal archives after forty days might reveal compromising documents that could be exploited in subsequent maneuvering for and against particular candidates for the patriarchal office. ⁶³

The identity of the principal candidates was clear. The main ones were Metropolitan Filaret (Denisenko) of Kiev, Metropolitan Vladimir (Sabodan) of Rostov, and Metropolitan Aleksi (Ridiger) of Leningrad. ⁶⁴ Despite his being the ranking prelate and locum tenens, Metropolitan Filaret had significant opposition. In the first place, he had just been elevated to become head of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, and the patriarchate was straining to give that church the appearance of virtual independence from Moscow. ⁶⁵ Moreover, Filaret was widely regarded as having mishandled the Ukrainian Greek-Catholics by inflaming passions over the years. Also, Maksim Sokolov published an article in the weekly journal Kommersant shortly before the council met, saying that it was "no secret" that Filaret was a "good family man," which is "not altogether becoming for a monk subject to the vow of chastity, and still less becoming for a patriarch. ⁶⁶

Metropolitan Vladimir of Rostov was the candidate of the reformers. As the respected chief of administration for the patriarchate, Vladimir was an activist. He had been a good rector of the Moscow academy and seminary. He had only been appointed to the Holy Synod in 1982 and was thus less tainted by collaboration than some other senior hierarchs. He was the most junior of the principal candidates, however, and the bishops, who had great influence in council voting, were mostly conservatives — as were many of the other delegates. ⁶⁷

The last of the major candidates was Aleksi of Leningrad. Aleksi had been a successful bishop of Tallin for three decades and head of the great Leningrad see for five years. He was highly experienced in central patriarchal administration and international work. He was known to be intelligent, energetic, hardworking, systematic, perceptive, and businesslike. In the weeks leading up to the national council, Aleksi was described in press stories as essentially "apolitical" and a guarantor of a desirable "quietness" and "peace" within the church. Others, particularly those fearing the possible election of Metropolitan Filaret of Kiev, described Aleksi as the "lesser evil." Aleksi had a reputation as a conciliator, "a person who can find common ground with various groups in the episcopate." ⁶⁸

Among Aleksi's possible drawbacks as a candidate was the fact that he was not wholly Russian. He grew up as the son of a prominent Orthodox priest in Tallin and was of mixed ancestry and of Estonian nationality. ⁶⁹ Another liability was the reverse of the coin with respect to his strength of experience. For thirty years he had operated in the context of church-government politics, accommodating the demands of the Council for Religious Affairs and the KGB. In 1987 the dissident magazine Glasnost had published some KGB reports of Aleksi's meetings with council representatives in the late 1960s. Aleksi came across in the documents as candid and sensible but prepared to talk with considerable openness to the KGB and willing to pass on unflattering tales about his fellow clerics. Vice Chairman Furov of the Council for Religious Affairs had characterized Aleksi in 1975 as loyal, patriotic, and not overly zealous — the most compliant of the three categories into which Furov placed the church's bishops. ⁷⁰

On June 6, 1990, the council of bishops met. There was some discussion of choosing the patriarch by lot in order to have the choice made by the hand of God, as had been done when Tikhon was selected in 1917, but this proposal did not carry. In the first round of voting by the bishops Aleksi received 37 votes, Vladimir received 34, Filaret received 25, and Metropolitan Yuvenali (Poyarkov) of Krutitsy received 25. In the second round of voting, Filaret was chosen over Yuvenali, and the bishops had their three candidates to recommend. ⁷¹

At the meeting the following day of the national church council, there were ninety bishops (two were sick), ninety-two lower ranking clerics, eighty-eight lay delegates (thirty-eight women), thirty-nine representatives from the church's convents, and eight representatives from the theological schools, for a total of 317. Forty of the delegates were from the church's jurisdictions abroad, and a few of the lay delegates were young people under twenty-five years of age. ⁷² Although additional prelates could be nominated from the floor, and four were, none of these candidacies survived to compete against the bishops' council's three nominees. ⁷³ In the first ballot Aleksi received 139 votes, Vladimir 107, and Filaret 66. In the runoff vote Aleksi received 166 of 309 valid votes, and Vladimir received 143. Aleksi was declared elected. The strength of liberal and reformist support for Vladimir and the poor showing of Filaret surprised some observers. ⁷⁴

Aleksi was enthroned on June 10, 1990, and received by Gorbachev, along with the permanent members of the Holy Synod, on June 12, 1990. According to an interview Aleksi gave Izvestiya on June 16, the new patriarch raised the question with Gorbachev of the Greek-Catholics in western Ukraine and the inroads made by the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad. ⁷⁵

Commentators writing after Aleksi's elevation seemed to give the new patriarch the benefit of the doubt, looking toward the future of the church with optimism. Many were impressed with the modesty of Aleksi's posture and the fact that he did not bring a great retinue of personal followers to Moscow. A few also pointed out, however, that Aleksi was a hierarch who carried the baggage of past church-state collaboration. For these reformers, who had hoped for a fresh start with a patriarch untainted by a record of compromises and deals, Aleksi's elevation was a disappointment. One could not altogether forget Father Gleb Yakunin's prediction before the national council that, if one of the "people of the past" were elected, a church schism would become inevitable. ⁷⁶

Even the final passage on October 1, 1990, of the long-heralded Soviet Law on Freedom of Conscience and on Religious Organizations spelled some continuing trouble for the church. ⁷⁷ The bill had been in gestation for years, and action had repeatedly been put off. ⁷⁸ The Council for Religious Affairs had consulted the church communities in February of 1989, and in its response the Russian Orthodox Church had emphasized the need to make the churchs' central administration and all its parts a single "juridical person," to reduce exorbitant taxes, and to secure the church's property rights and its opportunity to carry on religious instruction, charity work, and publishing. ⁷⁹ After the consultation with the religious communities, the draft legislation went to the ideological commission of the Communist Party's Central Committee staff. According to Kharchev, many in the party merely wanted to change the facade of government-church relations without changing the substance, but the party ideologues were only in a position to delay but not to sabotage implementation of the Politburo's decision. ⁸⁰

About a year later both the chairman of the responsible parliamentary committee and the church's Holy Synod were expressing concern about the apparent lack of progress. ⁸¹ No doubt as a result of these pressures, the Presidium of the USSR Council of Ministers reviewed the draft law on April 11, 1990. ⁸²

After a first reading of the draft law in the Supreme Soviet on May 30, 1990, the text was finally published in early June and enacted four months later. ⁸³ Clarified and somewhat improved from the church's point of view, the June text nonetheless continued to draw criticism and pointed commentary from observers. ⁸⁴ The most controversial question, still unresolved when the USSR collapsed, was whether religious instruction would be permitted on the premises of the nation's schools.

In the meantime, several republics, including the Baltic states, Ukraine, Georgia, and the Russian republic, were drafting their own legislation on religious freedom. These laws would prove to be more liberal than the USSR text but less radically so than some people had expected. The Russian republic enacted its legislation on October 25, 1990, slightly less than a month after the all-USSR legislation had been enacted. ⁸⁵ The Ukrainian law was passed in April 1991 and went into force in June. ⁸⁶ The question of primary jurisdiction for all-USSR or republic legislation remained unresolved for more than a year — until the breakup of the USSR at the end of 1991 settled the issue in favor of the republics.

The all- USSR legislation improved the situation of the religious communities in several ways. ⁸⁷ An individual religious community was relieved altogether of the legal obligation to register, although unregistered communities had limited rights beyond the opportunity to conduct worship in private premises. Religious denominations received the right to proselytize, publish freely, import literature, and have access to the media. Atheists were barred from using government funds or official facilities to propagandize or educate people in unbelief. ⁸⁸ Religious instruction of children of any age in private premises was authorized. ⁸⁹ The draft article permitting religious classes in public schools on a voluntary basis during non-school hours was struck from the bill, but the alternative draft article explicitly forbidding such instruction was also removed, which left the situation ambiguous. This was particularly true in the Russian republic, where legislation authorized optional religious instruction in preschools and teaching institutes, and religious teaching "bearing an informational character," without the performance of religious rituals, was permitted in state schools. ⁹⁰ Religious communities were authorized to own property, establish charitable institutions, and engage in manufacturing for religious purposes.

Clergy and church employees were taxed on the same basis as employees of any public institution, and they became eligible for social security and pensions. Taxes on religious organizations were reduced. Like other students, seminarians were deferred from military service. Clergymen were permitted to be active in politics, but religious organizations were not. Military conscripts received the right to attend religious services when not on duty, but alternative service for conscientious objectors was not mandated by the all-USSR legislation. ⁹¹

As Orthodox hierarchs pointed out, the resolution of a number of issues remained unsatisfactory. Although an individual church community, a convent, or even a diocesan or patriarchal office could register as a juridical person with the right to appeal to the courts, the nationwide institution of the church did not become an all-embracing legal entity. This meant, for example, that the property of a local church community that ceased to exist would not necessarily pass to the central Russian Orthodox institution. Another sticky question was registration of a local church community. It was not clear that the authorities were obligated — lacking legal grounds for refusal — to register a community promptly. Nor was it clarified whether local functionaries had to provide reasons to applicants in writing if registrations were denied. ⁹²

As Aleksandr Nezhny complained, the procedure for handing over church buildings to the church was "virtually unchanged." There was no legal requirement that previously confiscated church buildings be turned over, and even such premises as the Danilov monastery were not passing into full church ownership. The church also wanted but failed to get full ownership of churches repaired at the expense of believers and relief from rental payments. ⁹³

The USSR Council for Religious Affairs survived for a time as an organization of "informational, consultative and expert" character. Most registration functions were now to be performed by republic and local authorities. The all-USSR provisions became almost a dead letter when the Soviet Union ceased to exist at the end of 1991 — "almost" because Russia and other republics have not been entirely consistent in repudiating USSR legislative provisions. On occasion they enforce the Soviet laws that suit them. In any case, the Council for Religious Affairs passed from the scene because legislation of the Russian republic explicitly stated that "no executive and administrative organs of state power . . . assigned for the resolution of questions connected with the realization of the right of citizens to freedom of belief may be established on the territory" of the Russian republic. ⁹⁴

In October of 1990 the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church patriarch, Mstyslav (Skrypnyk), returned to Kiev from the United States and held services outside St. Sofia Cathedral and at St. Andrew's Church (still museums). The new Russian Orthodox patriarch, Aleksi II, also announced his intention to celebrate at St. Sofia. The Ukrainian People's Movement (RUKH) tried without success to dissuade Aleksi from celebrating in this formerly Autocephalist church. On October 27-28, 1990, Autocephalists gathered, as did Orthodox faithful. Militia, riot police, and KGB troops set up barricades and battled protesters. The patriarch was escorted into the cathedral by a back door on October 28. Aleksi bestowed the title of His Beatitude on Metropolitan Filaret (Denisenko), consonant with the elevation in status of the patriarchal Ukrainian Orthodox Church. ⁹⁵ After the incident, inter-confessional resentments continued to smolder.

Increasing political diversity presented the Russian Orthodox Church with difficult choices in serving Soviet citizens of every political sympathy while avoiding the embrace of right-wing monarchist and nationalist forces in the country, some of which were anti-Semitic. ⁹⁶ At the time of Aleksi's elevation, Aleksandr Nezhny asserted that the new patriarch was taking over a church "in the body of which is the poison of chauvinism" and recalled the heroic priests in Old Russia who saved Jews at the time of the pogroms and rejected the anti-Semitism of that era. In early 1989 a seminarian at the Moscow theological school, writing about his life there, asserted that hard-line communist infiltrators and "those from Pamyat [Memory]," the rightist organization, were recognizable when they inscribed themselves as seminarians and did not genuinely "learn here." According to an Orthodox worker at the Tolga nunnery, when Pamyat members came to help in the restoration work, "they didn't behave themselves." They would "rarely help in the manual labor," and when they did, "they always had a photographer with them." A commentator writing in the Moscow Church Herald, Weekly alleged that the supporters of Pamyat were ready to wave imperial flags but were not interested in "true worship." Nevertheless, a few priests became prominent in monarchist and right-wing political organizations; the movement to canonize Czar Nicholas II gained strength; Orthodox priests and laymen carried pictures of the executed czar at demonstrations; and a mixed Orthodox-patriots conference was held in late 1990 at which delegates called for the restoration of the monarchy. ⁹⁷

On Sunday September 9, 1990, Archpriest Aleksandr Men was murdered outside his home in Zagorsk. Born into an intellectual Jewish family, Father Aleksandr had been brought up as an Orthodox Christian by his mother. He became a prominent liberal theological force in Russian Orthodoxy, writing for publications of the Moscow patriarchate and via manuscripts smuggled abroad. Hardline elements in the Brezhnev security establishment had perceived him as a threat and had harassed him with interrogations and the confiscation of books. ⁹⁸ At the end of January 1990, I attended a program in a sports stadium in Moscow where approximately 15,000 people heard Father Aleksandr explain his convictions and answer questions. ⁹⁹ In answer to one question about anti-Semitic organizations, Father Aleksandr quoted then Metropolitan Aleksi in urging Orthodox faithful not to fall into bigotry, intolerance, and chauvinism. ¹⁰⁰

Soon after Men's death, Ogonëk published an article disputing police speculation that Men had been the victim of a drunken assailant or solitary robber. The assassin had smashed Men's skull with an axe at 6:30 A.M. as he was walking from his home to the railroad station on the way to his parish church. This would not have been a usual time for a drunk or robber to attack the priest. Men's briefcase was taken and his glasses, which he used only for reading, were found splintered and smashed underfoot, which perhaps suggested that the assailants had asked Men to read something. At a press conference in early 1991, Men's friends asserted that police investigators had been given the license number of a car that trailed Men on the day before his death, and a man seen on a deserted path near Men's home that day had been identified from photographs, but the police had not followed up either lead. ¹⁰¹ Plausible suspects in the Men killing would appear to have been hard-line communists, the KGB, or right-wing chauvinists. ¹⁰² The author in Ogonëk compared Men's murder with the assassinations of President Kennedy in the United States and Father Popieluszko in Poland, noting the profound psychological and political impact of those two killings. He then lamented that "our country" did not so much as shudder when Father Men, the saintly priest, was axed down. This commentary may have been unfair, however, as the crowd that assembled at Father Men's funeral was immense.

Another strange event occurred on December 19, 1990, that appeared to be an effort by hard-line forces to draw Patriarch Aleksi into supporting their law-and-order position. On that day an appeal was distributed at the Soviet Congress of People's Deputies, which was meeting in the Kremlin. It was an open letter calling on Gorbachev to take urgent measures, including a state of emergency and presidential rule in zones of conflict, to prevent "the breakup of the state." This appeal preceded the January violence perpetrated by state-controlled organs in Vilnyus and Riga and was interpreted as anticipating and justifying such acts. The appeal was issued over the names of fifty-three prominent national figures, including the most senior generals and admirals, the minister of culture, and — alone as the only religious leader — Patriarch Aleksi. ¹⁰³ Agence France Presse checked with Aleksi later on the same day, and the patriarch — who was ill and in the hospital — denied having signed the appeal. ¹⁰⁴ According to one report, the authors of the letter phoned the patriarch and gave him a distorted representation of its contents, after which Aleksi assented to the use of his name. ¹⁰⁵ In any case, his disavowal was immediate. The incident further illustrated the delicacy of the churchs' position.

The registration of new Orthodox religious societies continued throughout 1990. Yuri Degtyarev of the Council for Religious Affairs reported 759 new societies inscribed in the first five months of 1990 and only 1 deregistered. ¹⁰⁶ This was an impressive average of about 150 registrations a month, even though it was down slightly from the average of 210 registrations a month in 1989. Degtyarev acknowledged the slowing tempo, attributing it to more nearly "satiated" demand for new congregations on the local level and efforts by local authorities to deal with new registration requests themselves, not always favorably, rather than referring them to the central offices of the Council for Religious Affairs. Degtyarev recorded only 5 Ukrainian Greek-Catholic congregations registered in western Ukraine at the end of May, obviously many fewer than the number of Greek-Catholic congregations active there. He blamed local authorities for dragging their feet in recording changes in the actual situation on the ground. ¹⁰⁷

Official figures soon began to surface indicating that losses to the Ukrainian Greek-Catholics and the Autocephalists in western Ukraine had been massive. Degtyarev's statistics for January 1, 1991, reflected a total of 1,809 registered Ukrainian Greek-Catholic church societies, 952 Ukrainian Autocephalous Church societies (almost all of them in western Ukraine), and about 10,000 registered Russian Orthodox Church societies (down almost 2,000 from the end-of-September figure of 11,940). ¹⁰⁸ Besides these losses, there should also be counted the parishes in the USSR that went over to the jurisdiction of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad.

Table 7.1 lists the number of registered Russian Orthodox Church societies in each diocese on January 1, 1991. Increases and decreases in the number of registered parishes since 1986 are also shown. ¹⁰⁹ It should be noted, however, that these official figures were still lagging behind the situation on the ground in western Ukraine, as there were not as many as 704 functioning Russian Orthodox parishes in Lvov and Ternopol dioceses at that time. Nevertheless, the figures were beginning to catch up, as they did, for example, reflect the loss of more than go percent of the Orthodox parishes in Ivano-Frankovsk.

More than 4,000 new parishes had been established during and after the Millennium. About 1,600 of these were in Russia, and 1,700-plus were in Ukraine, offset in part by the officially recorded loss of almost 700 parishes in IvanoFrankovsk, Lvov, and Ternopol and a few more losses in Mukachevo (Transcarpathia) compensated by new parishes opened there. In Ukraine the least impressive gains were in Chernovtsy (northern Bukovina) and in the Russian-speaking territories of the east and north. The greatest gains were in the south of the republic and around Kiev (despite the loss of more than 20 parishes evacuated after the Chernobyl disaster in 1986). ¹¹⁰ Of the 10,000 parishes in the country, 5,031, or almost exactly 50 percent, were in Ukraine. By 1991 there had been 452 new parishes established in Kishinev diocese; 240 in Byelorussia; about 40 in Central Asia and Kazakhstan; and fewer than 15 in the Baltic states.

When the violence in Vilnyus exploded in mid- January 1991, Aleksi criticized both sides, suggesting that the Lithuanians had overstepped the limits of moderation and respect for the rights of others, and the Soviet leadership had made "a great political mistake — in church language a sin" in using military force against fellow citizens of the Soviet Union. ¹¹¹ Aleksi, himself from the Baltic states, must have been under great pressure to prove himself representative and worthy of the ancient Russian Orthodox Church.

On the night of February 1-2, 1991, a third priest in the Moscow area was murdered. Besides Men, the second had been Hegumen Lazar (Solnyshko), killed on December 26, 1990. Father Lazar was said to have been a member of a church commission investigating Men's killing, but church spokesmen denied it. It was also alleged that homosexuality might have had a role in Hegumen Lazar's death, but this too was disputed by the murdered priest's friends. The third cleric to meet a violent death was a monastic priest, Father Serafim (Shlykov), the pastor of a recently reopened church in Moscow. Politics was clearly a motive in Serafim's murder, as it had been in the murder of Men. Serafin had found himself trying to cope with a deeply split parish community, including a militant, anti-Semitic splinter of the Pamyat organization opposing his pastorate. Allegedly he had received at least one hate letter accusing him of having sold himself to the Jews. ¹¹²

In early March 1991, Aleksi met with the heads of the various religious communities in the USSR, and the group issued a public statement urging a "yes" vote on Gorbachev's March 17 referendum on renewing the Soviet multinational federation. Gorbachev received the assemblage of religious leaders on March 13. Aleksi was involving himself increasingly in politics. Within the previous two months he had not only made a pronouncement on the violence in the Baltic states but had also expressed himself publicly on the Persian Gulf war and the danger that Soviet citizens might be sent to fight there. ¹¹³

In June, on the first anniversary of his elevation to the patriarchal throne, Aleksi gave an interview to Izvestiya in which he made a public explanation and apology for his past collaboration with the Communist Party and government: Defending one thing, it was necessary to give somewhere else. Were there any other organizations, or any other people among those who had to carry responsibility not only for themselves but for thousands of other fates, who in those years in the Soviet Union were not compelled to act likewise? Before those people, however, to whom the compromises, silence, forced passivity or expressions of loyalty permitted by leaders of the church in those years caused pain, before these people, and not only before God, I ask forgiveness, understanding and prayers. ¹¹⁴

Aleksi accepted responsibility for the past. He said that Metropolitan Sergi had signed his 1927 loyalty declaration under threat by the authorities that over a hundred bishops in custody would be shot if he refused. He explained that Sergi wanted to save the church. As for the stand of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad, Aleksi charged that body with support for Hitler in World War II and for Lyndon Johnson in Vietnam, but "we did not do the same thing in Afghanistan." When the Izvestiya interviewers reminded Aleksi that Vice Chairman Furov of the Council for Religious Affairs had categorized him as among the most compliant hierarchs in 1975, Aleksi defended his record, noting that while he was bishop of Tallin in 1961, he resisted the communist authorities' efforts to make the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral in the city a planetarium (which, in truth, they did do elsewhere in the Baltic states) and to convert the Pyukhtitsa Dormition nunnery to a rest home for miners. He then asserted with pride that in his years as a bishop there was not one case of the administrative closing of a church, and the Pyukhtitsa nunnery grew in numbers from 80 in 1961 to 160 in 1988. (The official statistics for Tallin diocese do not quite support these claims.) ¹¹⁵

In July 1991, Aleksi attended the inauguration of Boris Yeltsin as the freely elected president of the Russian republic. He blessed the new president and spoke eloquently about their "gravely ill" country. ¹¹⁶ Aleksi and Boris Yeltsin were developing a relationship of mutual regard.

When the putsch attempt began on Monday, August 19, 1991, the patriarch did not of course know how things would turn out, and he bore an immense responsibility for defending the church's institutional position. Reportedly, Yeltsin sent his vice president, Aleksandr Rutskoi, to see the patriarch early on Monday morning, and Aleksi at first declined to receive Rutskoi, citing illness. ¹¹⁷ Apparently Aleksi relented, and Rutskoi was able to deliver Yeltsin's appeal to the patriarch to condemn the coup publicly. ¹¹⁸ At 10 A.M. the patriarch celebrated the liturgy in the Dormition Church in the Kremlin, and people at the service reported later that the patriarch omitted the usual prayer for Gorbachev's or anybody's government. ¹¹⁹ By the time the service was over, tanks were in the nearby streets.

According to Paul D. Steeves, the patriarch withdrew from the city of Moscow on Monday in the middle of the day, presumably to avoid being drawn into the political struggle. ¹²⁰ Some other senior Orthodox hierarchs were less circumspect and supported the coup. Reportedly, Metropolitan Filaret of Kiev, Metropolitan Pitirim of Volokolamsk, and Metropolitan Yuvenali of Krutitsy were among them. Pitirim was reported to have called on Minister of Interior Boris Pugo, a main activist in the putsch, on Wednesday, August 21. ¹²¹ The patriarch said in the Soviet parliament that he personally opposed the coup but had delayed speaking out immediately because of the differing views of other senior hierarchs. ¹²² A journalist of Moscow News later described relations within the Holy Synod as follows: The Synod tried to convince the public that it had remained united during the days of the August coup. The harder they tried, the more dubious this looked. One might suppose that the Synod members managed to convince the Patriarch that an open rupture within the Synod was fraught with highly undesirable consequences for him. ¹²³

On Tuesday, Yeltsin made a public appeal to Aleksi to speak out. ¹²⁴ Before that day was over, he did so, questioning the juntas' legitimacy and calling for restraint by the military, demanding that Gorbachev be allowed to address the people, and calling on the Supreme Soviet to take charge. ¹²⁵ Shortly after midnight he made a second appeal to armed civilians and soldiers not to commit the "grave sin" of fratricide and "bloody acts." This statement was amplified over loudspeakers to the troops outside the Russian "White House" half an hour before the major attack was expected and the first bloodshed did in fact occur. ¹²⁶ Later, he anathematized the plotters. ¹²⁷

Other priests, both of the patriarchal and émigré churches, moved faster than Aleksi did to rally to Yeltsin and the defenders of the White House, but they were less answerable for the safety of the whole Russian Orthodox Church. ¹²⁸ History proved Aleksi's judgment essentially sound during the August 1991 coup attempt, at a time when countless leaders in the nation jumped the wrong way. The central issues of the coup were glasnost, liberalization, democratization, constitutionalism, self-determination, and a market economy on the one hand, and preservation of the Soviet Union as a cohesive state under a socialist system on the other. The price of preserving the USSR had become repression, the instrument that had preserved czarist Russia so often over the centuries. The price of upholding the democratic path had become the fragmentation of the Soviet Union. Schism in the patriarch's church would be an inevitable ultimate result of such a political disintegration.

As 1991 progressed, the church continued to expand its educational endeavors, youth activities, and charitable operations. In the city of Moscow alone, thirty-two parish Sunday schools were teaching over 10,000 pupils in the late winter of 1991. As always, the main problem was to find enough qualified instructors. By late summer of 1991 the second Orthodox high school (gimnaziya) in Moscow was in operation. The Russian Orthodox Youth Movement began a scouting program and launched its own publication. ¹²⁹ The All-Church Orthodox Youth Movement was founded early in the year and held its first congress at Moscow State University in late January. ¹³⁰

With the coldest months of winter upon them, church workers focused on distributing food to institutionalized children; this aid effort depended largely on relief supplies provided by German donors. The church did not find it easy to get organized, and quantities supplied did not fully meet needs. ¹³¹ Patriarch Aleksi's trip to the United States in November had a clear purpose of encouraging greatly increased monetary and material support. The church was a natural channel for such efforts, as it was and is morally committed and relatively free of the wholesale corruption and black marketeering sweeping through the former Soviet Union. The church was slow, however, in its efforts to step into the breach, and some Protestant Christians moved more quickly than the Orthodox and on a larger scale. ¹³²

Mikhail Gorbachev's attempts to preserve a reduced-profile Soviet federation ended in December 1991 when Boris Yeltsin met the Ukrainian and Byelorussian presidents in Minsk and agreed to form what became the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). Within days, Yeltsin was in Rome promising John Paul II that all believers in Russia would enjoy constitutionally guaranteed equal rights. ¹³³ On December 26, Gorbachev arrived at the door of his Kremlin office to find a brass plaque bearing the name of Boris Nikolaevich Yeltsin by the door. The red flag with the hammer and sickle was soon lowered from atop the Kremlin and the Russian tricolor took its place. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was no more.

Governmental authorities had reported approximately 10,000 Russian Orthodox Church societies in January 1991, and there were probably no more than 10,800 registered societies a year later, in January 1992. ¹³⁴ The Ukrainian Greek-Catholics in western Ukraine claimed 2,176 churches in December 1991, or almost 400 more than the official registrations reported at the beginning of the year. ¹³⁵ The Autocephalists were estimated to have 1,400-1,600 parishes in late 1991, also an increase in the course of the year. ¹³⁶ The Russian Orthodox Church Abroad continued to claim just over 50 parishes and communities throughout the country. ¹³⁷

Between the spring of 1989 and the end of 1991, a number of dangerous problems became visible. In Ukraine — where most of the parishes of the church were located — Ukrainian Greek-Catholics and Ukrainian Autocephalists had seized between a third and a half of the parishes in the republic. Despite Aleksi's strong opposition to anti-Semites, chauvinists, and neofascists, some Orthodox clerics and believers were making common cause with these forces. Freedom-of-conscience legislation disappointed Orthodox Christians in significant respects.

Not everything was going badly, of course. The sun was still shining on the Russian Orthodox Church's revival. Patriarch Aleksi, despite the flaws in his record, was known by all to be a vast improvement in effectiveness over his predecessor, "the hermit of Chisty pereulok [the patriarchal headquarters]." ¹³⁸ The freedom-of-conscience laws in the various republics represented an immense advance over the regressive legislation of the Soviet era, and the atmosphere of religious liberty was a blessing. Institutional expansion advanced apace.

To change the metaphor, the edifice of the institutional church had been a bit like an old mansion opened up after the death of the aged person who inhabited it, who had kept the windows and blinds securely shut. Everything looked so much better after a spring cleaning, a little paint, and some refurbishing. Everyone felt so much better after open windows let fresh air, optimism, bustle, and energy blow through the long-shuttered rooms. Only later did structural problems with the beams and troubles with the roof become visible. Whether they too could be fixed with patience and hard work was the central question as the Year of Our Lord 1992 commenced.

If storm clouds gathered against the Russian Orthodox Church in 1990 and 1991, gales of hurricane force struck it in 1992. In January, the long-brewing tempest over episcopal collaboration with the KGB broke over the heads of church leaders. Soon Metropolitan Filaret (Denisenko) and his followers, supported by President Leonid Kravchuk of Ukraine, defied patriarchal authority and advanced tumultuously in the direction of complete independence for the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. This added another schismatic movement to the ecclesiastical divisions that had already appeared in Ukraine, where almost half of the parishes of the Russian Orthodox Church were still located even after the loss of between 3,500 and 4,000 churches to the Ukrainian Greek-Catholics and Autocephalists. ¹

The Greek-Catholics marched forward in what the Orthodox had come to fear was an expansionism that set its sights beyond western Ukrainian Galicia to the heartland of Orthodoxy. Some Autocephalists maneuvered to join with Filaret if he could enforce Ukrainian autocephaly and positioned themselves to profit from his failure if he could not. The Russian Orthodox Church Abroad and its associated movements — the Russian Orthodox Free Church, the "catacomb" church, and the True Orthodox — continued to pick up scattered parishes. Free Orthodox churchmen ever more loudly accused the patriarchal church of ecclesiastical imperialism and collusion with former communist authorities in the persecution of their adherents and parishes. Some political leaders and priests who had battled the godless authorities made common cause with the breakaway churches. A number of Orthodox priests and a few hierarchs drifted more visibly toward alliances with hard-line chauvinists, anti-Semites, and nationalist agitators. Sectarians and Asiatic cults increasingly threatened the beleaguered Orthodox, or so Orthodox leaders perceived the trends to be.

In the meantime, loyal Orthodox priests and workers labored in the vineyard, building churches, performing works of charity, teaching the essentials of the faith, and developing the infrastructure for new successes. It was not easy, however, to concentrate on the patient work of institution building amid the squalls.

Accusations that church leaders collaborated with the secret police, the Bolshevik government, and Communist Party organs were not new. They had been heard in the months after Lenin seized power, and the politics of the Renovationist schism and Patriarch Tikhon's efforts to combat it were directly related to the authorities' efforts to use collaboration as a wedge to divide the church and as an instrument to control it. Metropolitan Sergi's 1927 loyalty declaration and his subsequent perceived collaboration with the authorities had led to further assaults from the Karlovci Synod and the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad. In 1980, the émigré press in Paris obtained and published the 1975 secret report of V. G. Furov to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in which he contrasted the "loyal" and "patriotic" stance of all too many hierarchs with the actions of less cooperative bishops. In 1987, as previously noted, the dissident journal Glasnost published secret police accounts of KGB meetings with Pimen, Aleksi, and other senior clerics in which they purportedly had passed on sensitive information about fellow churchmen and internal church administration. In 1990, former KGB Major-General Oleg Kalugin publicly stated that some of the top hierarchs of the Russian Orthodox Church — whom he did not name — were "on the payroll of the KGB." ²

What was different as 1991 drew to a close was that the USSR was breaking up, the Soviet KGB was passing into limbo, and the KGB's files were becoming available to parliamentary commissions of inquiry and other investigators. Three experts on Orthodox Church politics undertook the task of culling the files and fitting the KGB's code names to the actual identities of collaborating bishops. These researchers were Father Vyacheslav Polosin, chairman of the Russian Supreme Soviet's Committee on Freedom of Conscience, Father Gleb Yakunin, deputy of the Russian Supreme Soviet and a famous dissident priest, and Aleksandr Nezhny, the journalist. ³ Their findings were reported in large-circulation periodicals in January 1992. ⁴ The most prominently revealed KGB "agents" were Metropolitan Filaret (Denisenko) of Kiev, code-named "Antonov," Metropolitan Yuvenali (Poyarkov) of Krutitsa, code-named "Adamant," Metropolitan Pitirim (Nechaev) of Volokolamsk, code-named "Abbat," and Metropolitan Mefodi (Nemtsov) of Voronezh, code-named "Pavel." ⁵ It was said that Patriarch Aleksi, code-named "Drozdov," was also an agent, but he largely escaped denunciation, perhaps because the investigators did not quite want to accuse the head of the church. ⁶

Archbishop Chrysostom of Vilnyus, known as an intrepid and honorable priest, introduced a sensible perspective into the matter with his comments to Mikhail Pozdnyaev, published in Russkaya Mysl in Paris: Yes, we — I, at least, and I say this first about myself — I worked together with the KGB. I cooperated, I made signed statements, I had regular meetings, I made reports. I was given a pseudonym — a code-name as they say there — "Restorer." I knowingly cooperated with them — but in such a way that I undeviatingly tried to maintain the position of my Church, and, yes, also to act as a patriot, insofar as I understood, in collaboration with these organs. I was never a stool pigeon, nor an informer. ⁷

In defending his credentials for courage in resisting co-optation, Chrysostom mentioned that he had ordained Georgi Edelshtein (the celebrated dissident) when other bishops would not and had defended Edelshtein for five years. "Nobody touched him." For his resoluteness in this and other cases, Chrysostom had been removed from Kursk, the largest diocese in the Russian republic after Moscow, and had been sent off to distant Irkutsk to preside over a sixth of the parishes he had administered in Kursk.

Chrysostom was right. If the bishops wished to defend their people and survive in office, they had to collaborate to some degree with the KGB, with the commissioners of the Council for Religious Affairs, and with other party and governmental authorities. Courageous former dissidents remained critical, however, and the media were flooded with denunciatory articles, roundtable debates, and unflattering analyses of the hierarchs' past conduct. Church leaders reacted in outrage against their tormentors and the press. ⁸ Reportedly church representatives tried, successfully after a time, to convince the authorities to curtail the investigators' search of the KGB archives. ⁹ Polosin, Yakunin, Nezhny and Edelshtein went from talk show to interview to lecture hall. ¹⁰

Church leaders nursed their wounds, although most of the accused hierarchs escaped any formal sanction. The exception was Bishop Gavriil (Steblyuchenko) of Khabarovsk, but he was removed more for arrogance toward his priests and people than for his record of collaboration. The bishops' council of the Russian Orthodox Church met from March 31 to April 5, 1992, and did establish a commission, however, to make an "objective investigation" of the charges of past collaboration. ¹¹ Bishop Aleksandr (Mogilev) of Kostroma was named to chair it. Not yet thirty-five years old when he was named to the commission and consecrated bishop only two and a half years before, Aleksandr was untainted by past acts of episcopal venality, and he enjoyed a good reputation, even among dissident priests like Edelshtein. ¹² He would have needed to be courageous indeed, however, to do very much under the circumstances.

As USSR People's Deputy Sergei Averintsev had said earlier, "The laity believes that men of weak character have been elevated to the episcopacy," and "open atheists" were among "the Brezhnev episcopate." According to Averintsev, they were unrepentant of their sins. Father Edelshtein characterized the Moscow patriarchate as the "last Soviet institution." Others sneeringly dubbed it the Metropolitburo. ¹³

Averintsev and Edelshtein were partly correct but only partly so. There is little doubt that almost all of the bishops were and are believers. They are anguished by their acts of past collaboration, and most are deeply conscious of their sin. Although their attitudes echo the old order to some degree, they are not a "Soviet institution."

In early November of 1991 a council of bishops of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church requested that the Moscow patriarchate grant it full autocephaly. The patriarchate had granted the Ukrainian church administrative autonomy in 1990, but canon law requires that autocephaly be granted by the parent church with the concurrence of other Orthodox national communities. Consequently, the November 1991 action was a petition, not a notification. The request presented the following justifications: First, autocephaly would strengthen the unity of Orthodoxy in Ukraine, would liquidate the Autocephalist schism, and would check Greek and Latin rite Catholic expansion. Second, autocephaly would serve the interests of the Ukrainian nation. The petition added that an independent church in an independent nation was both canonically justified and historically inevitable. ¹⁴ In late November an inter-confessional forum was organized in Kiev (Kyyiv) to which Ukrainian president Leonid M. Kravchuk declared: "For an independent state-an independent church" ¹⁵ Partisans of the patriarchal church noted, however, that he did not apply the same standard to the Ukrainian Greek-Catholics. ¹⁶

At the end of December the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church decided that a plenary council of bishops would have to consider the Ukrainian church's petition. The Ukrainian bishops met again and sent the patriarchate another petition for autocephaly. Three bishops of the Ukrainian church opposed this action, and Metropolitan Filaret forthwith stripped them of their diocesan jurisdictions. ¹⁷

The Moscow patriarchate soon began to report "thousands" of letters and telegrams from clerics and laypeople throughout Ukraine entreating Moscow to resist Filaret's plans. Believers in the Donets basin were quoted as protesting Filaret's "dictatorial regime" and asking that their former bishop Alipi (Pogrebnyak) be returned to them. The bishop who had replaced Alipi in Donetsk found the strain more than he could bear and had to be relieved at the end of January. He died seven weeks later. Laypeople in Kiev diocese reportedly told Moscow that some clergy silenced by their clerical superiors had approached representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad with the thought of joining the "catacomb church." Some parishes stopped mentioning Filaret at the place in the liturgy where senior hierarchs are named in prayer. ¹⁸

On February 4, 1992, Aleksi II telegraphed Filaret admonishing him to desist from canonical sanctions against clergy who opposed his position, at least until a

Holy Synod meeting scheduled for February 18-19 could discuss the situation. In reply, Filaret advised Aleksi not to interfere in the internal life of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. On February 19, Aleksi and the Holy Synod sent a formal message to Filaret deploring pressure on Ukrainian priests to sign statements favoring autocephaly and condemning Filaret's punitive sanctions. ¹⁹

The planned conclave of the council of bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church (with the Ukrainian bishops' participation) met from March 31 to April 5, 1992, at the Danilov monastery in Moscow. Most of the bishops opposed autocephaly. Some bishops in eastern Ukraine, where Russians are numerous, reported that priests and laypeople in their dioceses had told them: "If you support autocephaly in Moscow, don't show your face here again!" Metropolitan Mefodi (Nemtsov) of Voronezh reported that priests in eastern Ukraine were coming to him to see if they could slip across the border to his neighboring diocese to escape the "pressure." The bishop of Alma Ata, Archbishop Aleksi (Kutepov), pointed out that minority Orthodox believers in Muslim Central Asia would be fragmented by internal divisions if Russian and Ukrainian Orthodoxy split. The councils' conclusion was that western Ukraine favored autocephaly, but the majority of hierarchs, clergy, and believers in central and eastern Ukraine did not. Nevertheless, the bishops decided that the next national council of the Russian Orthodox Church — scheduled for 1995 — should consider the question.

Under great pressure, Filaret promised to present his resignation as head of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church to a council of bishops in Kiev and accept transfer to a lesser see. On April 6, the day following the last session of the Moscow council, an expanded meeting of the Holy Synod of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, meeting in Kiev, rescinded Filaret's summary transfers of the three bishops who had opposed him. ²⁰

Filaret returned to Kiev and disavowed his promise to resign. In a press interview on April 14, 1992, he asserted that the bishops' council in Moscow had violated church statutes because it had disregarded the Ukrainian Orthodox Church's already recognized autonomy, and he could not, in conscience, step down. On May 6-7, 1992, the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church met again. Filaret had been invited but did not appear. Moscow lamented that, when Filaret had renounced his April promise to resign, he had repudiated an oath made with his hands placed on the Cross and the Gospels. The Holy Synod forbade Filaret to act as head of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church except to convene a bishops' council to present his resignation; if he failed to comply by May 15, Filaret would be summoned before an ecclesiastical court. On May 7, Aleksi and the Holy Synod also sent a message to the bishops, clergy, and laity of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church asserting that the majority of Orthodox in Ukraine clearly did not wish to separate from Moscow but reaffirming that a national Russian Orthodox Church council would further consider the question. ²¹

Later in May, the patriarch gave interim responsibility for the Ukrainian church to Metropolitan Nikodim (Rusnak) of Kharkov, the senior Ukrainian hierarch after Filaret, who convened a council of Ukrainian bishops for May 27-28. Eighteen of the twenty-two Ukrainian bishops met in Kharkov and elevated Metropolitan Vladimir (Sabodan) to head the church. Vladimir had until then presided over the Russian see of Rostov and had been in charge of patriarchal administration, not functions closely associated with an autonomous Ukrainian Orthodox Church. Nevertheless Vladimir was the runner-up to Aleksi in the patriarchal election of 1990. Vladimir was also a born Ukrainian and had been a student, instructor, and rector at the Odessa seminary, bishop of Pereslavl Khmelnitski (vicar of the Ukrainian exarch), bishop of the Ukrainian see of Chernigov, and editor of the Ukrainian exarchate's journal, Pravoslavny Visnyk. The Kharkov council reiterated the Ukrainian bishops' November 1991 petition for canonical autocephaly. ²²

The Ukrainian government's Council for Religious Affairs issued a statement after the Kharkov council declining to recognize the validity of Vladimir's election, asserting that there had been violations of the officially registered Ukrainian church statute, including a provision in it requiring that the head of the church be a bishop serving on the territory of Ukraine. The government's council expressed continuing support for Filaret. ²³

On June 11, 1992, a bishops' council of the Russian Orthodox Church charged Filaret with flagrant insubordination, "cruel and arrogant" treatment of bishops in his jurisdiction, the creation of a schism, and unworthy personal conduct. Filaret was demoted to the status of a simple monk. ²⁴ Somewhat later, the ecumenical patriarch, Bartholomeos I, endorsed the bishops' action against Filaret and the election in May of Vladimir as head of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. ²⁵

A joint church council of Ukrainian Orthodox loyal to Filaret and representatives of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church convened on June 25, 1992. The unification of the two churches was proclaimed the next day under the name Ukrainian Orthodox Church-Kiev Patriarchate (UOC-KP). Patriarch Mstyslav (Skrypnyk) of the Autocephalists, aged ninety-four, was proclaimed head of the unified church, and Filaret was chosen as Mstyslav's deputy. The Autocephalist negotiators were led by Metropolitan Antoni (Masendich), thirty-one, Mstyslav's chief of administration in Kiev. Mstyslav was in the United States; Antoni reported that he had failed to reach the aged patriarch to consult him, and Mstyslav thus was not informed prior to the unification action. The Ukrainian Weekly, published in Jersey City, New Jersey, did reach Mstyslav and quoted the patriarch as follows: "If [the union] is with the remnants of the Church headed by Filaret, then I cannot imagine that we could cooperate or unite with him. It would be beneath my dignity to cooperate with Filaret." ²⁶ The heads of the western Ukrainian autocephalous dioceses, where most of the autocephalous parishes were located, also failed to endorse the unification. ²⁷ In fact, hostile local believers in northern Bukovina all but mobbed Filaret when he visited there. ²⁸

On July 1, 1992, Mstyslav flew to Kiev, ostensibly to enforce his decision to repudiate the union with Filaret. Once Mstyslav was in Kiev, however, the Ukrainian government pressed him to relent, and he was reported to have issued an ambiguous statement to the effect that anyone who wished to join his church was welcome. Mstyslav then flew back to the United States. ²⁹ There the patriarch's opposition to Filaret became clear again, and his office later announced the removal of Metropolitan Antoni because of Antoni's collaboration with Filaret (Antoni did not obey the removal order). Later, on December 15, 1992, a church council of the merged church met in Kiev, reaffirmed the June merger, and took the position that Mstyslav — for church matters in Ukraine — was under the jurisdiction of the church authorities in Kiev. ³⁰

On June 11, 1993, Mstyslav, by then ninety-five, died in Canada, where he was visiting relatives. The authorities in Kiev of the merged church retained Metropolitan Filaret as patriarchal deputy and elevated Metropolitan Vladimir (Romanyuk) (Volodymyr in Ukrainian), sixty-seven, a hero of resistance to Soviet power who had been confined in the camps in Siberia for ten years, to act as head of the church until an all-Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox council, scheduled for October 21, 1993, could choose a new patriarch. ³¹

Relationships among the Autocephalists became even more complicated when a bishops' council of the anti-Filaret group met in Lvov in July of 1993 and selected Archbishop Petr (Petro, Petrus) of Lvov to become their candidate for the patriarchal throne left vacant after Mstyslav's death. Petr had opposed the union of June 25-26, 1992, remaining steadfastly loyal to Mstyslav. A church council of this anti-Filaret faction assembled in Kiev on September 7, 1993, and selected Archbishop Dmitri (Demetriy) of Pereyaslav and Sicheslav as patriarch (rather than Petr of Lvov). Dmitri, a seventy-seven-year-old priest (Petr or Petro Yarema), had taken monastic vows and had been consecrated bishop a few weeks earlier. He was enthroned on October 14,1993, at the Church of Our Savior in Kiev. ³²

For its part, the merged Ukrainian Orthodox Church-Kiev Patriarchate (UOCKP) convened its council on October 21, 1993, as scheduled and selected Vladimir (Romanyuk), already acting head of the church, as patriarch. The result was that the Autocephalists became an overtly divided body with two rival patriarchs competing for authority. Metropolitan Constantine of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church in the United States appealed to leaders of both groups on July 12 and on August 21, 1993, to resolve their differences, name a unification commission, and end the new schism. ³³

In December 1993 five bishops of the UOC-KP broke with Filaret (Denisenko) and declared obedience to Metropolitan Vladimir (Sabodan) of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Moscow patriarchate). The most prominent of them was Metropolitan Antoni, who had been a principal moving force in the unification with Filaret on June 25-26,1992, and had harbored ambitions to become patriarch instead of Vladimir (Romanyuk). Antoni handed over his own church, St. Feodosi, and was demoted from the rank of metropolitan to that of bishop. He was then placed on medical leave in Russia. ³⁴

In the struggle between Metropolitan Vladimir (Sabodan) and Metropolitan Filaret (Denisenko), Vladimir appealed to President Kravchuk of Ukraine on August 19, 1992, protesting the favoritism of Ukrainian authorities toward the UOCKP. According to Vladimir, there were a dozen instances of violence during the summer of 1992, when armed groups seized cathedrals, diocesan offices, and monasteries under Vladimir's jurisdiction, most of them in western Ukraine. ³⁵ Reportedly the Ukrainian National Self-Defense Guard (UNSO), a Ukrainian nationalist militia, forcibly occupied Ukrainian Orthodox churches and turned them over to Filaret's people. UNSO deployed its irregular troops to defend Metropolitan Filaret's residence in Kiev and to secure Filaret's possession of St. Vladimir's Cathedral. UNSO troops also tried to storm the monastery of the Caves, but monks, novices, and seminarians there contained the initial assault, and special military detachments of the Ukrainian Ministry of Interior (OMON Black Berets) later went into action against UNSO to the surprise of combatants on both sides. Metropolitan Vladimir arrived in Kiev on June 20, 1992, and set up his residence at the monastery. ³⁶ Nevertheless, Kravchuk, some leaders of the Ukrainian parliament, and elements in the Ukrainian political movement RUKH continued to support Filaret, and Ukrainian authorities continued to withhold governmental recognition of Vladimir's church. ³⁷

Official Ukrainian statistics published in early 1993 listed 5,658 Orthodox parishes under Vladimir and the Moscow patriarchate, 1,665 parishes of Filaret and the Autocephalists allied with him, lo Russian Orthodox Free Church parishes (under the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad), and 2,759 Greek-Catholic parishes. ³⁸ Despite their losses, the Orthodox affiliated with Moscow had apparently gained a net of 500-600 parishes in Ukraine during the two years after January of 1991, virtually all of them newly established Orthodox communities. ³⁹ (The number of parishes adhering to Moscow in 1994 will be discussed at the end of the chapter.)

When Filaret broke with Moscow and joined the Autocephalists in 1992, he brought with him little more than St. Vladimir's Cathedral in Kiev and a few scattered parishes, although forcible seizures carried out by UNSO and transfers of jurisdiction sanctioned by Ukrainian governmental authorities resulted in accretions in strength. In early 1993 it appeared Filaret had 250-300 parishes of his own (not Autocephalist ones). ⁴⁰ According to commentators dose to the Moscow patriarchate, the height of Filaret's campaign — abetted by the Ukrainian authorities-was in the summer of 1992. Filaret also was in control of considerable Ukrainian Orthodox Church wealth. ⁴¹ Moreover, in the autumn of 1992 he opened a trans-Dniester diocese, appealing to Slavs in conflict with the Moldovan authorities. ⁴² Reports in late 1993 indicated that Filaret and the UOC-KP might have made some additional gains at the expense of the anti-Filaret Autocephalists and Vladimir's Ukrainian Orthodox associated with Moscow. At the end of 1993, the UOC-KP claimed 3,000 congregations with 2,500 churches and priests. This was no doubt an exaggeration, but this church, by then headed by Patriarch Vladimir (Romanyuk) and Filaret, clearly had greater Autocephalist strength than Patriarch Dmitri (Yarema) had. The anti-Filaret Autocephalists claimed 1,500 parishes but had only about 300 priests. ⁴³

The Greek-Catholics continued steadily to increase the numbers of their parishes in western Ukraine from the 1,912 they had in January of 1991 to almost 3,000 in the spring of 1994 (With 2, 200 church buildings). In the eastern regions of Ukraine the Greek-Catholics had close to 40 parishes. ⁴⁴

In Latvia, the entry of Orthodox priests from Russia became more difficult after Latvian independence was recognized following the August 1991 putsch. Nevertheless, a diocesan meeting of clergy and laity on November 11, 1992, voted to preserve the Latvian Orthodox Church's canonical ties with Moscow, and on the following day, Metropolitans Yuvenali (Poyarkov) and Kirill (Gundyaev) and the archbishop of Riga, Aleksandr (Kudryashov), met with Latvian government representatives and worked out a formula of autonomy — but not autocephaly — for the Latvian Orthodox Church with church properties to be under Latvian jurisdiction, ownership, and control. ⁴⁵ Not all Latvian political and religious leaders were satisfied with the arrangement, however, and local Orthodox clerics predicted a fragmentation of the church, with some of the ninety parishes in the country remaining in canonical union with Moscow, some adhering to the Latvian Orthodox Church Abroad, and some adhering to the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad (three parishes had passed over to this last jurisdiction by late 1992). ⁴⁶

As for Estonia, the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church decided in August of 1992 to give the Estonians independence in administration, church management and instruction. The Estonian synod would own church properties and be supreme in civil matters. This status conformed to Patriarch Tikhon's dispositions made in July of 1920. ⁴⁷ In the spring of 1993 the patriarchate went a step further, granting the Estonian church independence in all but canonical relations with Moscow — the same status given the Orthodox in Ukraine and Belarus.

With respect to the 150 sisters of the Pyukhtitsa nunnery, most of them Russian, the authorities took the position that the nuns could remain as "guests."

Patriarch Aleksi's Estonian origins have given the nunnery and Estonian priests a degree of visibility and perhaps some protection. Even so, about twenty of the eighty-three parishes in the country have returned to obedience to the ecumenical patriarch at the Phanar (as during the interwar period) and call themselves the Autonomous Estonian Orthodox Church. On August 16, 1993, the Estonian authorities recognized their synod as the sole legitimate successor of the prewar Orthodox Church, despite the fact that three-fourths of the parishes still adhere to the Moscow patriarchate. Russian-speaking parishes side with Moscow, while most Estonian-speaking orthodox parishes have broken away. ⁴⁸

In Lithuania, Archbishop Chrysostom's known courage and moral strength, his outspoken pro-Lithuanian stand after the January 1991 massacre in Vilnyus, and the overwhelming Catholic strength in the country have combined to make the situation of the small Russian Orthodox Church community more acceptable and less threatening than in the other Baltic states. Apparently Chrysostom has so far managed to hold his diocese together and retain considerable independence of action. ⁴⁹

In late December of 1992, Radio Bucharest announced that the Romanian Orthodox Church had decided to reincorporate Kishinev (Chisinau) diocese as a metropolitan see. A Moldovan (formerly Moldavian) delegation headed by Bishop Petr (Peduraru) of Beltsy (vicar of the diocese of Kishinev) had made the request. Evidently, Petr had displayed pro-Romanian and anti-Muscovite tendencies as 1992 had progressed. On September 8, 1992, three months before the bombshell announcement in Bucharest, a diocesan meeting of Moldovan clergy disciplined Petr and forbade him to conduct services. To forestall defections, the Russian Orthodox Holy Synod had granted the Moldovan church self-administration on October 5, 1992. The synod also raised Archbishop Vladimir (Cantareanu) to the rank of metropolitan. Vladimir's Moldovan church submitted its statute — which had been approved by the Holy Synod — to the Moldovan government for registration. At about the same time, Bishop Petr, who evidently had received some advice and assistance from the Romanian patriarchate, submitted a statute for the "Bessarabian metropolitanate," a body to be under the authority of the Romanian church. The Moldovan government declined to register either statute, urging the two sides to work things out. Metropolitan Vladimir convened a meeting of bishops, priests, and parish representatives from most of the churches in the diocese and obtained their "overwhelming majority vote" in favor of retaining the church status granted by Moscow in October. ⁵⁰

Moldovan governmental authorities invited the two sides to a meeting on December 16, 1992, at which encounter Metropolitan Vladimir urged Petr to accept Moscow's authority. Petr refused and walked out. On December 20, 1992, Metropolitan Vladimir learned that Bishop Petr and his delegation had been received by Patriarch Feoktist of Romania. ⁵¹

Feoktist and the Romanian synod appointed Petr acting head of the Bessarabian metropolitanate and invited Moldovan priests to pass over to the jurisdiction of the Romanian Orthodox Church. According to Metropolitan Vladimir, only 7 of the 715 church servers in Moldova became sympathizers or open supporters of Petr. ⁵² In mid-1994, the large majority of Moldovan priests and parishes were continuing to adhere to Vladimir and the Moscow patriarchate. How long this will remain true, however, is problematical. If the bulk of Moldova's 650 parishes should ultimately pass over to Romanian jurisdiction or should break with Moscow, about 7 percent of the total number of parishes in the Russian Orthodox Church community in the former USSR would be removed from Moscow's authority. ⁵³

What is emerging is the piece-by-piece, stage-by-stage detachment of Orthodox communities in former Soviet republics outside of present-day Russia. Moscow's position is buttressed by the historical Orthodox canonical requirement that autocephaly requires consent and by the relationship Aleksi II has established with Bartholomeos I, the ecumenical patriarch. Nevertheless, the drift of events must be recognized as negative in the long term for the Russian Orthodox Church.

Two problems for the Russian Orthodox Church had roots deep in Russia's past and greatly increased in magnitude as 1992 and 1993 passed into history. The first was the growth of religious sects and quasi-religious movements competing with Orthodoxy for the soul of Russia. The second was the effort by Russian nationalists, many of them right-wing extremists, to enlist Russian believers in their cause.

The sectarians ranged from evangelical Protestant denominations, supported by volunteers and massive infusions of money from abroad, to occult Asian sects and even to avowedly pagan movements. ⁵⁴ Siberia and the Pacific maritime provinces have been particularly at risk from the Orthodox point of view because merciless suppression of Orthodoxy over the years resulted in the creation of what many Orthodox churchmen have described as a desert of spiritual ignorance and indifference. When I talked with Bishop Arkadi (Afonin) of Magadan in the summer of 1992, he lamented a large Protestant missionary "Invasion" from Alaska with a million dollars to spend, a well-financed Presbyterian proselytizing effort among Korean immigrants, and a Baha'i incursion onto Sakhalin Island. This was not to speak of the efforts of Evangelical Christians, Baptists, and other homegrown Russian Protestants.

I proceeded to Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk in 1992 and discovered that a wealthy Iranian Baha'ist had indeed financed the establishment of a thriving Baha'i religious community. In 1992, the city of Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk (population about 200,000) had seven churches, one of them Orthodox and the remaining six of them sectarian. Not long before, Hegumen Ambrosi (Yepifanov) of Vladivostok reported that the sectarian movement was "very aggressive," whereas "we have only two or three clerics in the diocese with a seminary education. People as yet know very little — they don't know what the Russian Orthodox Church is, what its structure is, who the bishop is, still less who the Patriarch is." ⁵⁵

The spread of sectarianism is by no means confined to the Russian far east. In Ukraine, the John Guest evangelistic team conducted a month-long crusade in Kiev in 1991. ⁵⁶ Mission Volga brought the gospel message to "over 120,000 people" in the summer of 1992. ⁵⁷ The great Olympic Stadium in Moscow has been used repeatedly for evangelical mass meetings, including Billy Graham's crusade of October 23-25, 1992. ⁵⁸ Western televangelists like Robert Schuller, Pat Robertson, and others are also active. ⁵⁹ According to Orthodox Russia, more than 700 Western organizations are working to evangelize the Russians, and over 2,000 Protestant preachers are preparing themselves to work in Russia. ⁶⁰

During my travels in Russia each year, I have found Western evangelical missionaries everywhere. In the summers of 1993 and 1994, for instance, I visited Archangel, Kostroma, Minsk, Perm, Petrozavodsk, Smolensk, Syktyvkar, Tula, Yaroslavl, and Yekaterinburg and found that U.S. Christian witnessing groups were or had just been to every one of those cities. These committed men and women suffer the disadvantages of not speaking fluent Russian — although Russian evangelicals interpret for them — and not staying in any city long enough to become part of a Christian community. They have the advantages of evident sincerity and of resources, including large numbers of Russian — language Bibles to distribute as gifts and sometimes medicines, clothing, and food. A woman who had gone to one of their meetings told me that the U.S. lay preacher asked the crowd at the end of his presentation who in the throng had found Christ. An older woman rose and answered: "Those of us who were Christians when you came are Christians still." Yet the evangelicals are making gains.

The reaction to Western proselytizing of Orthodox and other religious leaders in Russia has been deep concern. On April 20, 1993, President Boris Yeltsin received the patriarch, the mufti responsible for European Russia and Siberia, the head of the Council of Evangelical Christian and Baptist Churches, and other Russian church and parliamentary leaders. As Yeltsin's press chief described the meeting, Aleksi II said relatively little, but other church leaders complained about the misuse of tourist visas to mount proselytizing campaigns, expansionist activity by Roman Catholic missionaries, and foreign-sponsored Islamic penetrations. In an action taken apart from the meeting, the patriarch seems to have sent confidential letters to Yeltsin and Supreme Soviet president Ruslan Khasbulatov urging them to restrict foreign missionary activity on Russian territory. ⁶¹

In July 1993 the Russian Supreme Soviet passed a bill requiring foreign religious organizations to attach themselves to Russian religious bodies or seek accreditation, which might be denied if the foreign body acted against the interests of the Russian state or undermined "social concord." After opposition was expressed by the Roman Catholic Church, foreign Protestants, sects such as Hare Krishna, and Russian champions of religious liberty, President Yeltsin withheld his signature and returned the bill to the parliament. At the end of August the Supreme Soviet backed off from the proposed restrictions. When the fate of the bill was still hanging in the balance — in July — the patriarch publicly deplored the "massive" western pressure on Yeltsin to veto it. Reportedly, "President" Aleksandr Rutskoi actually signed it on October 4, during that crisis. There is continuing speculation that the idea of the bill lives on. ⁶²

On the personal level, Russian Orthodox people resent the perceived assumption of foreign Protestants that Russia is a pagan land without its own Christian community, which must be won for Christ. An article in the Moscow Church Herald, Weekly characterized Billy Graham's crusade as a grandiose, self-satisfied, immodest "show," which treated the Russians as if they were natives of New Guinea without authentic religious roots, faith, or culture. ⁶³

Nevertheless, Russians often publicly and privately acknowledge their sense of religious emptiness and then express interest in knowing more about some Asian sect. I have frequently been approached by young people selling copies of books by these mystics. It is easier to learn the teachings of the guru Shree Shmiman in Moscow than in New York.

In mid-1991 church publications had already been musing about the possibility of a "25-50-year moratorium" on foreign proselytizing, and the Holy Synod examined the question of heretical and occult movements in December of that year. The bishops' council of March-April 1992 discussed "movements from the East," theosophists, and mystical sects. Orthodox Church publications have carried exposés of Hare Krishna activities, tele-sorcery, extrasensory influences, witchcraft, black magic, and devil worship. ⁶⁴

There are movements and sects that add nationalistic and militaristic politics into the mix. In 1984, Father Ioann (Bereslavski) of the "True Orthodox Church" began receiving "revelations" of the Word of the Mother of God. Allegedly he represented the Mother of God as urging that new money be printed with her likeness and that of Nicholas II. ⁶⁵ After Father Ioann and a colleague, Petr Bolshakov, organized the Mother of God Center, the movement began to enjoy "ever increasing popularity." ⁶⁶ The center held a meeting in a Moscow movie house in May 1993 at which 1,600 people were said to have been present. With a staff of several score persons, the center claims the adherence of "thousands" in Russia. Quite a few "fanatical" supporters are teenagers, and an organization of outraged mothers has charged that many of these young people were recruited through misrepresentation and extortion. ⁶⁷

In 1992 a retired army major reported receiving a letter from the Mother of God Center inviting him to become a priest of the catacomb church. The letter asserted it had been revealed to Father Ioann that Russia would be redeemed by military officers. The major was invited to sign a "white charter" and take part in a "great liturgy" that would commit him to the movement. In a similar vein, the Moscow Church Herald, Weekly reported on meetings held in late 1991 and early 1992 at the Central Museum of the Armed Forces in Moscow, one of which was attended by no less a figure than Aleksandr Rutskoi, then vice president of Russia. Apparently these meetings included representatives of the True Orthodox Church, among them Father Ioann, and veterans from the Soviet campaigns in Afghanistan. It was asserted there that Russia would be saved by the army, and an astrologer predicted which dates would be propitious for armed action. Combat flags were blessed. ⁶⁸

Another cult movement, the Great White Brotherhood, also tried to attract teenagers away from their families, allegedly using hypnosis and mind-altering drugs to do so. In 1990, cult founder Yuri Krivonogov (Kryvonohov) proclaimed himself the reincarnation of the Apostle Peter, the Prophet Isaiah, and John the Baptist. He further proclaimed his wife, Marina Tsvigun, to be Maria Devi Christos, the incarnation of Jesus, who would be crucified and rise from the dead on Judgment Day in November 1993 at the great St. Sofia Cathedral in Kiev. Cult leaders boasted of 150,000 followers, who would die with their crucified messiah. In the summer of 1993, I saw Maria Devi posters on church doors as far away as Archhangel on the White Sea, and other notices were reported from Moldova to Moscow. Ukrainian police arrested at least 600 cultists when the fateful November arrived. Many of them soon began hunger strikes in detention and had to be force-fed. Yuri, Maria, and about sixty followers were arrested inside St. Sofia on November 10, 1993, after battling police with fire extinguishers seized in the cathedral. Observers variously blamed the cult manifestation on alleged Muscovite attempts to discredit the Ukrainian authorities and the "spiritual vacuum" young people were experiencing. ⁶⁹

Laymen doing works of charity and religious education and the Union of Orthodox Brotherhoods that unites them have been influenced on occasion by nationalistic elements. In particular, the Union of Christian Renovation and the St. Sergius Brotherhood of Sergiev Posad have campaigned against "Jewish-Masonic" plots, have held prayer vigils to protest the church's continuing failure to canonize Nicholas II, have organized cells of like-minded individuals for semi-political purposes, and have noisily criticized the patriarch. At the union's third congress in St. Petersburg in June 1992, "patriotic" Orthodox delegates objected strenuously to conciliatory interfaith remarks Aleksi made to a meeting of rabbis in New York during the patriarch's visit to the United States in November 1991.

Some church hierarchs have also expressed nationalistic and occasionally even anti-Semitic sentiments. In particular, Metropolitan Ioann (Snychev) of St. Petersburg has become a strident champion of some of these views. He has publicly given credence to "the Protocols of the Elders of Zion," the anti-Semitic forgery concocted by czarist intelligence agents, and has denounced or denigrated the Masons, Western evangelical missionaries, the "almighty dollar," the breakup of the Soviet state and army, Roman Catholic popes, and "Russophobes." In early 1993 representatives of the patriarchate were obliged to disavow an article the metropolitan had written, noting that the opinions expressed there and elsewhere were "personal views" and not positions of the church. ⁷⁰

As 1994 progressed, the rift between "modernists" and "traditionalists" widened. Archpriest Georgi Kochetkov became a focal point of the controversy, as he had introduced gospel readings in vernacular Russian and had edited the church Slavonic texts at other places in the liturgy to make the service more readily understandable to ordinary Russians. Advocates of church renewal additionally favored acceptance of the western Gregorian calendar, reformist political activism, enhanced ecumenical dialogue with Roman Catholics, Protestants, and Jews, and sympathetic understanding of women attending church in slacks and with heads uncovered. The conservatives, led by the Union of Orthodox Brotherhoods and hierarchs like Metropolitan Ioann of St. Petersburg, accused Kochetkov and his "neo-Renovationist" allies of arrogance and a desire to debase the language of the traditional liturgy. Underlying the controversy was the disdain of some traditionalists for "Yeltsin's Jews and western lackeys" and the conservatives' support for what appeared to be messianic religious and political imperialism.

For their part, the modernists, who were clearly in a minority among the clergy, raised the specter of a return of the activities of the "Black Hundreds," who had persecuted Jews and liberal thinkers during the last years of the Czar. The patriarch, struggling to prevent the rift from becoming a new church schism, tried to silence Kochetkov and transferred him from the great Moscow church of the Vladimir icon of the Mother of God to a small, not yet functional church. Caught between the contending factions, Aleksi delayed Kochetkov's transfer for several months. The patriarch's formal position was that revisions in the liturgy should be approved by a church council, and an individual priest or group should not introduce changes without comprehensive debate and full authorization. Kochetkov reluctantly submitted to patriarchal authority, but the struggle between conservatives and reformers is far from over. ⁷¹

In April 1992, the Moscow Church Herald, Weekly published an open letter from thirty Moscow priests to Metropolitan Vitali (Ustinov) of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad characterizing the canonization by Vitali's church of Nicholas II and his family in 1981 as "a gift of God to all Russia." The Patriarchate, while not yet moving to canonize the Czar, took the occasion of the 75th anniversary of his murder to declare national repentance. ⁷² At the end of the same month Patriarch Aleksi II conducted funeral services in St. Petersburg for Grand Duke Vladimir Kirillovich, until then head of the Russian imperial house. The services were carried out with great deference and ceremony but in an essentially nonpolitical way. The same issue of the Moscow Church Herald, Weekly also carried a letter from a student at the Minsk seminary who advocated "an Orthodox monarchy" as the best form of governance for Russia and who looked forward to a time when catechisms for young people would once again proudly say "For Faith, Czar, and Fatherland — God, Czar, Russia." It was less significant that the seminarian felt as he did than that the Moscow Church Herald, Weekly published his letter.

As indicated in chapter 7, the Freedom of Conscience Laws left the relationship between the church and military service only partially resolved. The church confessed that it did not have enough trained priests experienced in military service to assign as chaplains. Nevertheless, the Russian minister of defense, Pavel Grachev, called on the patriarch at his residence in March 1994 — to the annoyance of some non-orthodox religious leaders not so favored — and an agreement on cooperation and the training of chaplains was reached. In an earlier speech to the Humanities Academy of the Armed Forces the patriarch had spoken of a "spiritual vacuum" in the army, and had emphasized the deleterious effects of the vicious hazing practiced against new recruits and ethnic minorities, of the high incidence of suicides in the armed services, and of the criminality, drug addiction, alcohol abuse, and boredom all too evident in military life. The patriarch also exalted the nonpolitical, neutral function of the defense forces and warned that soldiers must not allow themselves to become "toys" of either the left or the right. ⁷³

On September 21, 1993, President Boris Yeltsin suspended the Russian Congress of People's Deputies and ordered new parliamentary elections on December 11-12. At midnight on the same day the parliament voted to depose Yeltsin and declared Vice President Aleksandr Rutskoi acting president. Authorities loyal to Yeltsin soon cut most telephone and electric lines and prevented heating fuel, water, and supplies from reaching the parliament building (the White House). Patriarch Aleksi, who had been in the United States on a visit to mark the bicentennial of Orthodoxy in North America, cut short his U.S. tour and returned to Moscow on September 28, offering to mediate between the two sides. He talked with Yeltsin in the Kremlin, with Constitutional Court chairman Valery Zorkin, and with two envoys from the parliament. He nearly succeeded in brokering an agreement under which lawmakers and their supporters would have surrendered most of their arms, government authorities would have restored some services to the building, and both sides would have cooperated in patrolling the premises. Opposition deputies in the White House rejected the agreement, however, and violence erupted on the streets of Moscow on October 2.

On October 3 pro-parliament forces, urged on by Rutskoi, stormed the offices of the mayor of Moscow and carried out a bloody but ultimately unsuccessful assault on Moscow's Ostankino television complex. Aleksi was reported to be suffering heart problems. On October 4 Yeltsin ordered and army troops executed an assault on the White House, bombarding the building, forcing its defenders to surrender, and overcoming snipers in the vicinity. The officially acknowledged dead numbered 187, the heaviest toll from fighting in Moscow since the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. If Aleksi could have pulled off his mediation, he and his church would have emerged as national saviors. As it was, the outcome was very sad. Aleksi had repeatedly prayed for the avoidance of bloodshed and national fratricide, but it was not to be. ⁷⁴

Table 8.1 shows the number of registered Russian Orthodox communities adhering to the Moscow patriarchate in each diocese on January 1, 1994. The total is approximately 12,800, or 2,700 more than in 1991 (about 700 more than in January 1993). The Russian republic increased from about 3,500 parishes in 1991, to 4,600 in 1993, and to 5,200 in 1994. There were notable gains in Siberia and some areas in the Urals. Ukraine increased from about 5,000 parishes in 1991, to 5,590 in 1993, and to 5,700 in 1994. Great losses were suffered in western Ukraine as the Greek-Catholics and Autocephalists acquired formerly Orthodox churches, and considerable losses were registered around Kiev as Metropolitan Filaret captured churches with the help of the Ukrainian National Self-Defense Guard (UNSO). Compensating gains in other regions of Ukraine resulted in modest overall accretions of strength for the Moscow-affiliated Orthodox. Belarus increased by 240 parishes between 1991 and 1994; Kazakhstan and Central Asia increased by about 60; and the Baltic states increased by about 10. ⁷⁵

Since mid-1992, church hierarchs have begun to use a figure of "about 15,000 parishes" when speaking of the Russian Orthodox Church's strength. ⁷⁶ One has to wonder whether the preceding figures are truly thousands of parishes off the mark. I believe the discrepancy is really a difference in definition, as church leaders give figures for the number of churches or parishes in a jurisdiction and then state frankly that a large proportion of the churches are not yet repaired, in some cases not yet reclaimed from secular institutions and personal tenants, and not yet holding services. In Moscow, for example, Aleksi II stated in December 1992 that the patriarchate had 225 churches but added that services were being conducted in only 132 of them. ⁷⁷ In Rostov diocese church leaders spoke in early 1993 about organizing icon-painting shops to supply "over 600 churches in the district" but noted that two-thirds of the churches were still awaiting restoration "to life," ⁷⁸ In Saransk (Penza) diocese, church leaders reported that "in the past year the number of Orthodox parishes in Mordvinia reached seventy-seven" but churches for these parishes "have been turned over without roofs, with obliterated paintings and smashed iconostases." ⁷⁹ In light of the foregoing, it is not difficult to understand why a diocese-by-diocese listing of functioning churches would diverge considerably from global figures mentioned by Russian Orthodox Church hierarchs.

Compared to the "stable" figures of the Brezhnev time before the Millennium, the number of functioning church societies in Kazakhstan, Central Asia, and Russia east of the Urals more than trebled in the period 1986-1994, from about 240 to more than 740. Russia west of the Urals achieved lesser but impressive relative gains, increasing from approximately 1,800 parishes in 1986 to over 4,600 parishes in 1994. Active parishes under Moscow's jurisdiction in Ukraine, about 5,700, accounted for about 45 percent of the parishes in the Russian Orthodox Church establishment, a marked shift from almost a half century of the parishes in Ukraine constituting about 60 percent of the total.

For a numerical listing of Orthodox societies between January 1945 and January 1994, see Table 8.2 ; for a graphical rendering of the same data, see Figure 8.1. ⁸⁰

Aleksandr Nezhny, the famous commentator on Russian Orthodox Church affairs, has turned deeply pessimistic over the past several years. In June 1992 he concluded in an article for Russkaya Mysl that the church "is crashing to the ground — about that there is no doubt; and who will remain whole in the wreckage — God knows." ⁸¹ Although this judgment seems overly gloomy, the picture of the church's situation is not altogether reassuring. Only about 5,000-5,500 parishes are certain of remaining under Moscow's jurisdiction when the dust of independence settles in the fourteen former constituent republics of the USSR beyond Russia's borders. Besides this threatened shrinkage of the church's institutional base, there are other looming problems that must be addressed before an overall assessment of the church's prospects can be attempted.

There is the persisting shortage of priests qualified to fill parish vacancies. There is the issue of the former catacomb church and its anger at the hierarchy's long record of support to the godless communist state. There is the problem of trying to prepare church leaders and educate priests, monks, nuns, deacons, and other essential religious personnel. There is the challenge of providing scriptures, liturgical books, scholarly monographs, catechistic materials, and other publications-in the needed languages — in order to make the teaching church effective at all levels. There is the yawning chasm of absent money and unassured physical resources. There is the problem of recovering the laity, many of whom have drifted into religious apathy. These issues are crucial to the church's prospects for health and growth; they will be addressed in the chapters that follow. Then, perhaps, a judgment and conclusion may be possible.

Since world war II, the Russian Orthodox Church has lacked a sufficient supply of clergy to staff its parish churches and meet the needs of Orthodox people in their long struggle to preserve their faith. The church emerged from the war with about 2,000 fewer priests than churches. This deficit has varied between approximately 1,000 and 3,000, and has been most in evidence in the western lands. Moreover, a large proportion of priests ordained in Soviet times have been the product of informal instruction and service as readers and psalmists rather than graduates of formal theological courses at seminaries and academies. The continuing deficit has deeply affected the nature and scale of cloistered monastic life, the nature and scale of theological education, and the church's ability to maintain a supply of deacons.

To set the stage, there were more than 50,000 Orthodox priests before the Russian Revolution; by mid-1939 there were no more than 300-400, although several thousand "laicized priests" were working in secular jobs after having been driven from their clerical positions. ¹ In 1941 the Soviet government stated publicly that there were 5,665 serving priests of the Orthodox tradition. ² Nearly all were clerics who had been absorbed in 1939-1940, along with their parishes, in what was then Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, northern Bukovina, Bessarabia, and eastern Poland.

After Hitler's 1941 invasion, Orthodox priests came in behind the Germans from Poland, Romania, and other places. Some priests who had escaped to the West during Stalin's 1939-1940 annexations began to trickle back to their old homes, now occupied by the Wehrmacht. Others came out of hiding or resumed their calling, and new priests were consecrated from among psalmists and other church servers. As the Germans retreated, however, many priests from these lands fled with them. ³ On the Soviet side of the front lines, in the never-occupied territories, a relatively small number of priests had resumed their vocation.

After the Soviet annexation of Transcarpathia in 1945, about 100 priests of the formerly Czechoslovak Orthodox diocese of Mukachevo joined the Russian Orthodox Church, but this number of priests could not fully staff the 152 traditionally Orthodox parishes acquired at the same time; some of the priests in this territory had also fled. In early 1946, as the archives of the Council for Religious Affairs later revealed, there were an estimated 8,500 Orthodox priests in the country serving in 10,500 registered church societies, a shortfall of 2,000. ⁴

The Council for Religious Affairs compiled statistics on the education, age, and time of ordination of Orthodox clergy in early 1946. Of the priests and deacons, only 3.5 percent had a university or theological academy degree; 39 percent more had graduated from a high school-level seminary, a ten-year public school, or a comparable high school; 57 percent — more than half — had not advanced beyond a basic primary school education. Eight percent of the priests and deacons were under forty-one years of age; 16 percent were forty-one to fifty; 31 percent were fifty-one to sixty; 33 percent were sixty-one to seventy; and 12 percent were over seventy. More were over seventy than under forty-one. Forty-six percent of the priests had been ordained before 1917, 30 percent had begun serving during World War II, and 24 percent had either been ordained in the interwar period or after World War II. Almost half of the clergy had been ordained before the Bolshevik revolution. Of the 264 priests and deacons in the Russian republic who had begun their clerical service during World War II, over 90 percent had been ordained in the occupied territories, and less than 10 percent, or twenty-four persons, had actually been ordained in the Soviet hinterland before the end of the war. ⁵

In March 1946, when the Lvov council incorporated 2,500 Ukrainian Greek-Catholic parishes into Orthodoxy, only 1,000 Greek-Catholic priests became even nominally Orthodox. The total number of Orthodox priests in the country on January 1, 1948, was 11,800. ⁶ Despite the continuing efforts of Orthodox hierarchs to ordain devout laymen and close the gap, the increase in parishes was outpacing the ordination of priests, and the overall deficit of priests was about 2,400.

By 1949, with the forced incorporation of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church in Transcarpathia, 400 more parishes had become part of the Russian Orthodox Church, but only about 100 priests had. Official figures indicate that on January 1, 1950, there were approximately 12,000 priests in the whole country and 14,300 Orthodox parishes; the deficit was 2,300. ⁷

What areas suffered from this deficit? There was a shortfall of about 500 priests in eastern and central Ukraine, about 1,800 in western Ukraine (counting both former Greek-Catholic and Orthodox clerics), close to 150 in the Baltic states, and 250-300 each in Byelorussia and Moldavia. The shortfall in these areas was approximately 3,000, or 700 more than the nationwide deficit of 2,300. The deficit was lower at the national level because Moscow, for example, had at least 50 more priests than parishes. The extra priests worked in large churches, in the patriarchate's central offices, and in the academy and seminary at Zagorsk. In fact, most of the dioceses where theological schools were located had more priests than churches. ⁸ It was clear enough that the principal shortfalls were in the western lands annexed at the time of World War II and in other territories that had been occupied by the Germans.

The council's figures for the number of priests in the country dropped by almost 1,000 in 1950, to roughly 11,200. Stalin's decision to renew repression was in full swing by 1950, and many of these priests had either lost their authorizations to serve or had been arrested. Aged priests also continued to die, and new ordinations were being restricted. Some of those who ceased to be active were no doubt Greek-Catholics unwilling on reflection to serve under the Orthodox. The figures for western Ukraine dropped by 500 priests, half of the overall loss. In January of 1951 the overall deficit of priests in the country stood at 2,700, and the deficit in Ukraine alone stood at 2,800. ⁹

Stalin died in March of 1953, and the number of priests in the country reached a low point of approximately 10,700 at the end of the year. In 1954 there was a modest turnaround, and by January of 1958 the authorities reported about 11,100 priests in the country — about 400 more priests than there had been on January 1, 1954. ¹⁰ Khrushchev's amnesties of the mid-1950s, which caused the release of a considerable number of clerics from Siberian camps, no doubt contributed to this increase. ¹¹ Because the number of churches had held steady, the deficit dropped to 2,300 — still a significant shortfall, of course, and concentrated as always in the western lands. There were only about four priests for every ten parishes in formerly Greek-Catholic areas. ¹²

The council's statistics for January of 1958 for the entire Soviet Union revealed that 3,648 priests and deacons served in 1,491 city churches, 610 clergy served in 559 churches in factory towns, and 7,911 clergy served in 11,363 rural churches, for a shortfall of almost 3,500 priests and deacons in the village parishes. This meant that a third of the rural village churches in the USSR had no priest. It also meant that the city churches had an average of 2.4 priests and deacons per church. ¹³

Between January of 1958 and January of 1960 the number of priests in the country declined by almost 900; three-fourths of the decline took place during 1959 as the Khrushchev antireligious drive was gathering momentum. The militant atheists were assiduously enticing priests to abandon their calling. Despite their efforts, informed Western scholars estimated that only about 200 priests joined the atheists in the half dozen years of the Khrushchev drive. ¹⁴ In January of 1960, 64 bishops, 10,236 priests, and 782 deacons were serving in 12,964 churches, for an overall deficit of 2,700 priests. ¹⁵ Thus the gains made between the time of Stalin's death and January 1958 had been wiped out, and the gap was again at the 1951 level.

The next half dozen years saw the ranks of priests in the USSR (including bishops) decline by about 3,400, from 10,200 in 1960 to 6,800 in January 1966; they were serving in about 7,500 churches. ¹⁶ The gap had been reduced to approximately 700, but only because about 2,000 more churches than priests were deregistered during those years of the Khrushchev antireligious drive. As described in Chapter 4, thousands of parishes in Ukraine that had no priest in 1960 were removed from the Soviet government's rolls of registered church societies permitted to hold services. Over half of the more than 3,000 priests deregistered after January of 1960 had been serving in Ukraine, and the persisting deficit was still concentrated there. ¹⁷ Because the surplus in 1958 of clergy over churches in cities and industrial towns was about 2,200, it must have been true even after the Khrushchev drive that the deficit of priests in village parishes was close to 2,000. In January 1966 there were only 1,327 priests to serve 2,267 parishes in the five Western Ukrainian oblasts of Lvov, Ternopol, Ivano-Frankovsk, Chernovtsy, and Transcarpathia. ¹⁸

In central and eastern Ukrainian territories, about 60 percent of the churches were closed between 1958 and 1966, but the deregistration of priests was even more unsparing. The number of registered priests (including bishops) dropped from 2,446 to 865, a loss of about two-thirds. In Dnepropetrovsk oblast, of 167 priests ministering in 1958, 30 remained in January 1966; in Zaporozhe 9 of 92 priests remained; in Poltava 57 of 221 priests remained. These were not mere statistics; they represented immense human tragedy. In Zaporozhe province, where nine out of ten priests were driven from their vocation to dig ditches, sweep streets, or beg, most parishioners in the province were left with neither a priest nor a church. ¹⁹

For every priest who retired in more normal times during the 1950s and after 1964, I calculated that 1.9 priests retired in 1960, 3.2 retired in 1961, 3.0 retired in 1962, 1.3 retired in 1963, and 1.2 retired in 1964. ²⁰ This is consistent with the evidence that the Khrushchev drive peaked in overall intensity in 1961 and slackened during his last year in power.

In the five years between January of 1966 and January of 1971, the number of priests in the entire country declined by 100-150 a year to a level of 6,200 priests (and 600 deacons) in 1971. Between early 1971 and early 1975 the number declined at about half that rate, 60 a year, to 5,994 priests (and 594 deacons) at the beginning of 1975. ²¹ The rate of decline in the number of priests was close to the rate of church deregistrations, and the net deficit of priests for the country continued to range between 500 and 1,000. ²²

Between 1975 and early 1988 the number of priests held steady, hovering around 6,000. The number of churches continued to decline at the average rate of about 35 a year, and thus the net deficit of priests compared to churches was reduced to approximately 500. However, because of the city churches with several priests, clerics in the patriarchal administration, and priests in theological schools, 1,500-2,000 village churches must still have lacked priests, most of them as always in the western lands. For example, the bishop of Mukachevo stated in mid-1988 that 287 priests were serving in the 420 parishes of Transcarpathia. ²³